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THEOLOGY IN THE ENGLISH POETS.
 

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

THE LATE REV. F. W. ROBERTSON, M.A., LIFE AND
LETTERS OF. Edited by SToPFoRD Brooke, M.A.

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Lonpon: C. Kegan Pau & Co., 1, PATERNOSTER SQUARE,

 
LHEOLGGY dN THE
ENGLISH POETS.

COWPER—COLERIDGE—WORDSW ORTH
AND BURNS.

BY TOE

REY. STOPFORD A.” BROOKE, M.A,

CHAPLAIN IN ORDINARY TO HER MAJESTY THE QUELN ; MINISTER
OF ST. JAMES'S CIIAPEL, YORK STREET, 8T. JAM'S.

FIFTH EDITION.

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(UNIVERSITY
\ LIBRARY 7

 
   

  
 

(All riyhts reserved.)
PREFACE.

—_o—

Tue Lectures contained in this Volume were delivered
on Sunday afternoons in St. James’s Chapel, during the
season of 1872. Others, on Blake, Shelley, Keats and
Byron, delivered in 1873, will be published, I hope,
before the close of this year. The thing was an experi-
ment. I began it in May 187], when I asked the Rey.
J. M. Capes to deliver a course of lectures for me,
which should not take the form of sermons, but, on the
contrary, should avoid it. He chose as his subject the
Inner Life of the Romish Church, and afterwards the
Relation of Music to Religion. When he had finished
his lectures on these subjects, which were as well attended
as they eminently deserved to be, I began another course
on Theology in the English Poets, which I have con-
tinued to the present time. Since I began to:carry out

the experiment in 1871, the lectures on week-days in St.
vi Preface.

Paul’s have been established, and in St. James’s Church,
Piccadilly, discourses have been preached on a few Sunday
afternoons on such subjects as the Drama and the Press,
by eminent clergymen. I believe if a similar effort could
be made in many of the London churches in the Sunday
afternoons, that much good might be done. It would
give variety to cierical work on Sunday, and much know-
ledge that now remains only as latent force among
the clergy might be made dynamic, it 1 may borrow a
term from science. If rectors ot large churches would
ask clergymen who know any subject of the day well
to lecture on its religious aspect in the afternoon,
and give them half the otfertory, if needful, tor their
trouble, they would please themselves, enlighten their
congregations, and fill their churches. And they would
assist the cause of religion among that large number of
persons who do not go to church, and who think that
Christianity has nothing to do with Politics, Art, Lite-
rature or Science.

When I made this experiment, I had long desired
to bring the pulpit on Sunday to bear on subjects other
than those commonly called religious, and to rub out the
sharp lines drawn by that false distinction of sacred and

profane. If what 1 believed were true, and God in Christ
Preface. vii

had sanctified all human life; if every sphere of Man’s
thought and action was in idea, and ought to be in fact,
a channel through which God thought and God acted—
then there was no subject which did not in the end run
up into Theology, which might not in the end be made
religious. I wished then to claim as belonging to the
province of the Christian ministry, political, historical,
scientific, and artistic work, in their connexion with
Theology ; and to an extent greater than I had hoped for,
the effort, so far as I have carried it, has succeeded. The
blame of many accustomed to hear nothing but sermons
from the pulpit has been wholly outweighed in my mind
by the fact of the attendance of many persons who were
before uninterested in religious subjects at all. And
then, neither the blame nor the praise of the present is
any proof of the goodness or badness of a thing.

The Poets themselves formed the only text book I
have used, but in the two first lectures, when treating
of the growth of the Poetry of Man and:of Nature, I
have had much help from an admirable Essay of Mr. F.
Palgrave’s, which appeared in the “Quarterly Review ”

of July, 1862.
Storrorp A. Brooks.

Mancrester Square,
Lonvon, April, 1874,
CITAP.

I.
II.
Til.

Iv.

VI.
VIL.
VIII.

IX,

XI.
XIL.
XIII,
XIV,
XV.

XVI,

CONTENTS,

FROM POPE TO COWPER . a
FROM POPE TO COWPER-continucd
COWPER . : : .
COLERIDGE 7 : . 7 : .
WORDSWORTH . ‘ i 7
WORDSWORTH—continued  . .
WORDSWORTH—continucd . F
WORDSWORTH —continued  . *
WORDSWORTH— continued . “
WORDSWORTH—continued . ‘
WORDSWORTH—continued . 5
WORDSWORTH—continued a
WORDSWORTH—continued . ,
ROBERT BURNS , : 5 ‘
ROBERT BURNS—continued ‘

ROBERT BURNS—continued . ‘

112
137
164
179
193
221
236
268
287
304
322
THEOLOGY IN
THE ENGLISH POETS.

 

LECTURE I.

FROM POPE TO COWPER.

Tar Lectures which I begin to-day, and which I hope
to be able to carry on Sunday after Sunday in the after-
noons, are on the Theology which may be found in the
English Poets, Spoken from this place, they will not
enter into poetical criticism, or attempt to estimate the
poet; for that would carry me too far from the main
subject, within the limits of which I shall endeavour
always to remain. The subject is delightful, and it is not
difficult to define its special interest.

The Poets of England ever since Cowper have been
more and more theological, till we reach such men as
Tennyson or Browning, whose poetry is overcrowded with
theology. But the theology of the poets is different from
that of Churches and Sects, in this especially, that it is
not formulated into propositions, but is the natural
growth of their own hearts. They are, by their very
nature, strongly individual; they grow more by their own
special genius than by the influence of the life of the

B
2 Theology in the English Poets.

world around them, and they are, therefore, sure to have
a theology—that is, a Doctrine of God in his relation to
Man, Nature, and their own soul—which will be inde-
pendent of conventional religious thought. They will
be, as poets, free from those claims of dogma which
influence ordinary men from their youth up, and from
the religious tendencies of surrounding opinion, Their
theology will therefore want the logical order which pre-
vails in confessions and articles: and as each will give
expression to it in vivid accordance with his natural
character, it will be a different thing in each.

The great interest, then, of looking into this subject lies
in the freedom and individuality of the thoughts on a
subject in which men are so seldom free or individual.
We see theology, as it were, in the rough; as, at its
beginnings, it must have grown up in the minds of
earnest and imaginative men around certain revealed or
intuitive truths, such as the Being of God or the need of
redemption.

At the same time I shall confine the inquiry to their
poetry. I shall not seek in their letters or in their every-
day talk for their theology. For in their ordinary inter-
course with men they were subject to the same influences
as other men, and if religious, held a distinct creed or
conformed to a special sect; and if irreligious, expressed
the strongest denial of theological opinions. It is plain
that in ordinary life their intellect would work con-
sciously on the subject, and their prejudices come into
play. But in their poetry, their imagination worked
unconsciously on the subject. Their theology was not
produced as a matter of intellectual co-ordination of truths,
From Pope to Cowper, 3

but as a matter of truths which were true because they were
felt; and the fact is, that in this realm of emotion where
prejudice dies, the thoughts and feelings of their poetry
on the subject of God and Man are often wholly different
from those expressed in their everyday life. ‘Cowper’s
theology in his poetry soars beyond the narrow sect to
which he belonged into an infinitely wider universe.
Shelley, when the fire of emotion or imagination was
-burning in him, is very different from the violent denier
of God and of Christianity whom we meet in his daily
intercourse with men. He does carry his atheism and
hatred of religion into his verse, but these are the least
unconscious portions of his poetry. When he is floating
on his wings, he knows not whither, his atheism becomes
pantheism, and his hatred of Christianity is lost in enthu-
siastic but unconscious statement of Christian con-
ceptions.

Therefore I put aside the letters and conversations of
the Poets as sources for these Lectures, except so far as
they illustrate the treatment of theological subjects in
their poetry.

The theological element in English poetry becomes
strong in Cowper; but before lecturing on its development
in him, it will be necessary to trace its growth up to his
time, along the lines on which English poetry mainly ran.
This will be the work of the first two lectures, and in
carrying it out I shall lay down the mode in which the
main subject will be treated.

The devotional element in our English Poetry which
belonged to Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and some of the»

Puritan Poets, died away in the critical school which
B2
4 Theology in the English Poets.

began with Dryden and ended with Pope. The “ Religio
Laici” of Dryden is partly a reproduction of the scholastic
theology, partly an attack on the Deists, and it does not
contain one single touch of personal feeling towards God.
The “Essay on Man” is the preservation in exquisite
steel-work of the speculations of Leibnitz and Bolingbroke.
It is true the devoutness which belonged to Pope’s nature
modified the coldness of his philosophy, and there are
lines in the Essay on Man which in their temperate but.
lofty speech concerning charity, are healthier than the
whole of Cowper’s Hymns, while the ‘“ Universal Prayer”
is of that noble tolerance and personal humility which,
whether it be called deistical or not, belongs to the best
religion all over the world.

It has not been sufficiently said that Pope was sincerely
devout in heart, just as it has been ignorantly assumed
by many that the century in which he lived was irre-
ligious. His age may scem so in contrast with the
two centuries that preceded it, in which religious
subjects took so overdue a part, and theological feeling
ran into bitter uncharitableness. But it was most useful
for the whole future of English religion and theology,
that with the newly-awakened interest in science, philo-
sophic inquiry and commerce, religion also should learn
to extend its influence over other realms; and, in the
re-action from intolerance which a wider intellectual life
taught it, learn to do more justice to all opinions, and to
teach and practise a wider charity. We have not so
learned Christ as to call that irreligious. The work of the
Latitudinarian School was distinctly a work of charity,
and they and the scholars of the age of evidences are not
From Pope to Cowper. 5

to be accused of want of religious feeling, because it seemed
to them that to submit their faith to the challenge of free
inquiry, and to establish a kindly tolerance for the sake of
more united work for God, was better and more needful
for the time than the zeal for doctrine which condemns
one’s neighbour, or the passionate expression of devotional
feeling which tends to isolate oneself from one’s
neighbour. It is still more absurd to call the century
irreligious, when we remember that in its very midst—
not so much in opposition to this sober religion as in
reaction from its lower tone in the less educated clergy-
men, and in the indignant desire to make a religion for
the common people who were certainly neglected—the
revived religious life of the personal soul took its rise with
the preaching of Wesley.

With this movement, however, the critical school of Poets
had nothing to do. They had written much before it arose ;
they belonged not to the country and the people, but to the
city and the cultivated classes, nor did they, any more than
the theologians, speak much of their religious feeling,
or indeed possess much. But it is a very different thing
to say that they had no devotion, and the change, of which
I shall speak, does not assume that there was no personal
religion, but that there was no predominance of it, and
that therefore it was not expressed. Now and then, to
our surprise it breaks out, and it does so in the “ Uni-
versal Prayer.”’ Beginning with the ordinary and
systematic view of God as universal Ruler, but graced
with the wider charity of a Poet, it passes in the end into
personal devotion. No one can read the following lines
without hearing in them something of the same melody
6 Theology in the English Poets.

which afterwards was varied through every key by
Cowper.

If I am right, Thy grace impart
Still in the right to stay ;

If I am wrong, oh teach my heart
To find that better way.

Save me alike from foolish Pride,
Or impious discontent

At aught Thy Wisdom has denied,
Or aught Thy goodness lent.

Teach me to feel another’s woe,
To hide the fault I see ;

That mercy I to others show,
That mercy show to me.

wean though I am, not wholly so,
Since quickened by Thy Breath ;

Oh lead me wheresoe’er I go,
Through this day’s life and death.

X Nevertheless, this devoutness is of a wholly different
quality from that which we find in Cowper. It is man
bending before an infinite God whom he cannot under-
stand; it is not man rejoicing in being redeemed and
living with God as a child with its father. It is with-
out deep emotion, without that sense of personal union
or personal absence from God which comes of a vivid
realization of Christ as the master and redeemer of the
soul. It is a religion which the absence of Christ made
cold, and it so little tinges the poetry that one can scarcely
say that the poetry was religious at all.

At the same time we must not imagine with those who
lay down the rule that the Poets always represent their
age, that there was little or no personal feeling of devotion
at this time in England, because its poetry was not
in that way devout. That poetry was of the city, represent-
from Pope to Cowper. 4

ing the disputes of the sharp wits who argued on theology
as they argued on Whig or Tory politics: but outside the
city, where intellectual life was not vivid and discussion
scarcely known, there was a world of quaint and homely
piety of which we get no inkling in the Poets, Many a
grave Puritan household, hidden in its orchards, handed
down the tradition of the deep devotion of their forefathers;
many a quiet parsonage held in it men who had succeeded
to the spirit of Herbert, who ministered to English homes
where dwelt, behind the village green and among their
clipt yews and grassy plots women who devoted their lives
to God, and men who prayed with all the spirit of Wilson.

It was this religious life in the country which in the
growth of the religious element in our poetry first took
form inverse. But how did it happen that English poetry
got face to face with this devouter tone, with this
simpler religion? One reason may be that the deistical
struggle, having reached its height for a time, began to
need some repose before its new outbreak. Both sides
had in fact exhausted all they had then to say on the
subject, and men, wearied with looking after God through
the labyrinth of the intellect, now turned to see if they
had any chance of finding Him in their hearts, and
in that region naturally passed from an intellectual
to an emotional religion which at once sought relief in
poetry, Another reason was that a slow change had
begun to work in our poetry even before the death of
Pope and the change may be described as a migration
from the town to the country. Poets began to look at
Nature, not as it was around the villa at Twickenham,
but as it was in its own solitudes. Thomson took
8 Theology tn the English Poets.

men to the moors and placed them in the woods;
Gray went to the country churchyard, Collins to the hill-
top in the evening, Goldsmith to the village and its rustic
life. At last we reach Cowper in whose verse the town
is as wholly disliked as the country was by Pope, and
Crabbe in whom the whole interest centres round the
morals and manners and annals of the agricultural
poor.

In this wonderful passage of change, poetry found
religion in the country and took it up into itself. That
devotional element entered our poetry which in one form
rose to its height in Cowper; but which, in different
forms, each created by the individuality of the Poets, has
continued with a few exceptions to influence it to the pre-
sent day.

Green, in his Spleen, 1737, a gay little poem too much
neglected, marks a transitional period in this change. He
retires to the country to seek contentment and quietude,
but the influence of the city lingers round him, and he
takes his trip to town to amuse his life, to purchase books,
and hear the news,—

To see old friends, brush off the clown,
And quicken taste at coming down.

He is tired of the theological contests between Non-
conformists and the Church, between the opinions of
the enthusiast and those of the cooler inquirer; and he
resolves, in the peace of his retirement, to win his own way
to a religion of his own. It is almost the first touch we
get at this time of that individual work on theological
subjects which we find so strongly developed in the Poets
Front Pope to Cowper. 9

of our century. He is largely influenced by Pope and
the prevailing Deism, but he works out his own belief, and
makes his own speculations; and though he is not
Christian, he expresses his belief in a personal relation
between himself and God. It is more personal than
Pope would have made it, it is infinitely less than Cowper
would have made it, and the absence of Christ makes
it of an altogether different quality. But the transitional
element in it makes it interesting enough to quote. After
saying that his verse cannot dare to try and express God,
nor paint His features, ‘veiled by light,” he goes on—

My soul the vain attempt forego :
Thyself, the fitter subject, know.

He wisely shuns the bold extreme,
Who soon lays by the unequal theme,
Nor runs, with wisdom’s sirens caught,
On quicksands swallowing shipwrecked thought :
But, conscious of his distance, gives
Mute praise, and humble negatives.

In One, no object of our sight,
Immutable and infinite,

Who can’t be cruel or unjust,

Calm and resigned, I fix my trust:

To him my past and present state

I owe, and must my future fate.

A stranger, into life ’m come,

Dying may be our going home ;
Transported here by angry fate,

The convicts of a prior state.

Hence I no anxious thoughts bestow

On matters I can never know ;

Through life’s foul way, like vagrant, passed,
He'll grant a settlement at last,

And with sweet ease the wearied crown,
By leave tolay his being down.

K * * * * * ®
10 Theology in the English Poets.

He for His creatures must decree

More happiness than misery,

Or be supposed to create,

Curious to try, what ’tis to hate :

And do an act which rage infers,

Cause lameness halts, or blindness errs,

There is more of the speculative audacity of the century
in that than there is of piety; there is a fine moral
certainty that God, however unknown, must be just and
loving, but the point in it on which I dwell is its
individuality. It is not a systematic philosophy of
religion like Pope’s, it is a personally wrought out
religion, and it owed that to his country hfe. For in
such a life, men, removed from the conventional thought
of the literary circles in London, had room for individual
development, if they had received some previous culture.
This was especially true of religious feeling, and a little
before the Essay on Man was written, a true devotional
element entered into our poetry in the hymns of Watts,
and entered it outside of the town. Watts lived an
easy, retired life, in a great country house, from 1712
to 1748. There is in his hymns that pleasant devotion to
God which arises from piety and comfort, from placid
enjoyment of the beauty of the world, from a distant con-
templation of the sufferings of the poor beyond the gates
of the park, and from the gratitude to God which both
these enjoyments are likely to create. Many of them
strike a note of very fine praise, others of a didactic
charity; and some are touched with a quaint and simple
joy. Few hymns are better and brighter than that which
begins—
From Pope to Cowper. 11

Ising the Almighty Power of God,
That made the mountains rise ;
That spread abroad the flowing seas,
And built the lofty skies,

But still, we have in them no special tendency in doc-
trine, and no passionate or personal feeling of devotion.

It is the quiet, sober, moral religion of England on
which we touch; but even so, it is a wholly different
atmosphere from that which Pope breathed, and I doubt if
he could have drawn asingle breathin it. It is impossible
to fancy Pope ‘abroad in the meadows to see the young
lambs,”’ still less to fancy him linking religious feeling to
such a sight. The kind of devotion, and the scenery that
stirred it, were both out of his sphere. Half a century
passes by and the change has deepened; the seed Watts
sowed has sprung into a mighty tree; the quiet and
sober religion of his hymns has become the impas-
sioned and storm-tossed religion of the hymns of Cowper.
The praise which filled the heart of Watts when he looked
abroad on Nature has become the agonised prayer of
Cowper as he looked into the depths of his own soul.

What was the cause of this change, what new influ-
ence from without had come upon English poetry? It
was the great religious movement, led by the Wesleys,
joined afterwards by the fiery force of Whitfield, which
descended through Newton to the hymns and poetry of
Cowper. It was a preaching which, beginning in the year
1739,.seven years after the first books of the Essay on Man
appeared, woke up, and into fierce extremes, the religious
heart of England. The vast’crowds which on moor or hill-
side, in the deserted quarries of Devon and Cornwall, listened
2 Theology in the English Poets.

to Wesley, excited by their own numbers, almost maddened
by his passionate preaching and prayer, lifted into Heaven
and shaken over Hell in turns as the sermon went on,
crying aloud, writhing on the ground, tears streaming
down their cheeks, could not find in the hymns of Watts
or the metrical Psalms any expression of their wild ex-
perience; and the inexpressible emotion of their hearts
demanded voice for itself in poetry and in music, the
two languages of emotion, Both the Wesleys, but chiefly
Charles, had already, in 1738, seen and prepared for the
want, and a new class of devotional poetry arose. It was
impassioned, personal and doctrinal; it was impassioned,
for its subject was the history of the heart in its long
struggle with sin, in its wrestling with God, in the
horror of its absence from Him, in the unspeakable joy of
its presence with Him, in its degradation, its redemption,
and its glory, above all in its personal relation to Christ,
and the world of feelings which arose from that relation ;
nor was there a single chord of religious feeling left
unsounded, nor any that was not strung to tension. It
was also made especially personal. The first person was
continually used, so that each who sung or read the
hymn spoke of himself and felt Christ in contact with
himself. And it was doctrinal, for whether it sprang
from the party of Wesley or that of Whitfield, or from
their subdivisions, it was built on clear lines of theo-
logical thought; and the opposition between the parties,
who knew well the power of verse as a teacher and fixer
of doctrine, caused the lines to be drawn with studious
clearness.

Three things then belonged to it—passion, the personal
From Pope to Cowper, 13

element, and expression of doctrine. Neither of the first
two were by their nature apart from poetry, and the fact
is that so much are they of the essence of poetry, that
most of these hymns are by force of them, poetical. Pas-
sion had been long asleep in English poetry, ever since
the time of Elizabeth, and though I do not say that this
religious movement made the passion of the coming poetry,
yet it was one of its elements; and it is quite plain that its
emotional element was not out of harmony with a school
which in a few years, in Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron,
and Keats, was destined to express almost every phase
of emotion. Neither was its insistance on personal feel-
ing out of tune with the work of a class of men like the
Poets who “in themselves possess their own desire.”
In fact both these elements are characteristic of the
poetry which was now about to arise in England.
They both took root in Cowper, but they were sown and
watered by religion. He struck the first note of the pas-
sionate poetry, but the passion in him was in connexion
with religion. He struck the first note of that personal
poetry which was afterwards carried so far in the Prelude
of Wordsworth, the Alastor of Shelley, the Childe
Harold of Byron, but he struck it in connexion with
religion. Other poets led their passions and their personal
history into other realms, but Cowper kept them within the
sphere of his relation to God. Other poets derived their
passion from different sources—from Nature, from Beauty,
from the ideas of political rights and freedom, but Cowper
derived it from the daily wrestling of his soul with
God. And both the passionate and the personal element
came down to Cowper from without, from the great
14 Theology wn the English Poets.

Methodist movement. For the friend of Cowper was
Newton, and Newton was the child of Whitfield.

Both these elements run through the whole of Newton’s
well-known book, the ** Cardiphonia,” and (expanded over
the whole range of the relations of the soul to Christ)
constitute what was then called experimental religion.
As such they appear in the “‘Olney Hymns,” written jointly
by Newton and Cowper. Of Newton's share in them,
with the exception of the beautiful hymn—“ How sweet
the name of Jesus sounds,” I know nothing ; but if they are
anything like the ‘ Cardiphonia,” they must be charac-
terized by a robust and insensitive piety, and an ardent
display, somewhat too public, both of his own sinfulness
and of his love of Christ. Those which are written
by Cowper are passionate indeed, but it is passion
modified by the Poet’s tender and reserved individuality ;
are personal indeed, but it is egotism decently veiled, and
where it is outspoken it is so sudden, so spontaneous—
the hymn seeming to burst out of his heart with a cry—
that it is redeemed from the charge of deliberate exposure
of the sanctuary of the soul. Nothing can be finer, for
example, than the swift rush, as if feeling could no
longer be repressed, with which this hymn begins—

Hark ! my soul, it is the Lord;
*Tis thy Saviour, hear His word ;

Jesus speaks, anc speaks to thea,
Say, poor sinner, lovest thou me?

The same elements in connexion with religion run
through the whole of his poetry, and they deepen into
tragedy at the last. But on that I will not touch at present,
I only ask you now (for Iam but sketching the growth of
From Pope to Cowper. 15
the religious element in our Poetry, not as yet distinctly
touching on Cowper) to think of the new world into which
we have entered. Compare the ‘“‘ Universal Prayer ”—

Father of all, in every age,

In every clime adored,

By saint, by savage, or by sage,
Jehovah, Jove or Lord.

with “ O, for a closer walk with God,” or with ‘There is
a fountain fill’d with blood,” and it is not that they are
different, it is that owing to the overmastering presence of
Christ, as the Saviour of the personal soul, there is scarcely
any point of comparison. Compare the two following
quotations, the first from the ‘Essay on Man,” the
second from the “Task,”—the lines of Pope, impersonal,
apart, touched with scorn, thinking of God as Creator
alone, .with the lines of Cowper, so personal, so self-
compassionate, so intense in their realization of Christ,
that though no devotion is expressed, they yet thrill
with devotion. We step from the one to the other as from
a frozen to a tropic isle of religion.

Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,

A Being darkly wise, and rudely great :

With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride,
He hangs between ; in doubt to act, or rest ;
In doubt to deem himself a God, or beast ;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer ;

Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err ;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,

Whether he thinks too little or too much :
Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confused ;
Still by himself abused, or disabused ;
16 Theology in the English Poets.

Created half to rise, and half to fall ;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all:
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl’d ;
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world,

There is no passion and there is no personal feeling. Now
listen to this in which both these elements are intense :—

I was a stricken deer that left the herd

Long since—with many an arrow deep infixed
My panting side was charged, when I withdrew
To seek a tranquil death in distant shades.

There was I found by one, who had Himself
Been hurt by the archers. In His side He bore
And in His hands and feet, the cruel scars,

With gentle force soliciting the darts

He drew them forth and healed, and bade me live,

The other element which came from the Methodist
movement to Cowper was the doctrinal, and coming
to him early in life it was afterwards beaten into his
heart by Newton. It took with him the special form
of Calvinism, and we shall see what a terrible power it had
over him. But at present, we ask what there could be
in Calvinism, whether derived from Whitfield or from the
Puritans, which could find a home in Poetry? Its mere
doctrinal scheme, set out with logical severity, its debtor
and creditor account, its hard outlines supplied little
food to the imagination. But there was one’ doctrine
among others which did supply food, and that of a
terrible kind, to the imagination. It was the doctrine
that God had created some men for destruction, that they
were born into the world the victims of a stupendous fate.
They might struggle, they might desire to love God, they
might cry passionately for redemption, but there was no
From Pope to Cowper. 17

hope. Over them always hung the thunder-cloud and
out of it sooner or later, would issue the lightning of
their eternal doom. This mastery of some by a divine
and unpitying fate, and their long struggle against it is
distinctly poetic; and wherever it has taken form and in
whatever manner, it has’ created poetry. The same sort
of idea, only in a less revolting form, was at the root of
Greek Tragedy, which represented the freedom of Man
struggling with destiny, but preserving or attaining to
moral force through the struggle. And the tragic
element was deepened when, in spite of the moral victory,
the victor yet received the blow of Fate. Something of
the same element we find in the dramas of Shakespeare,
as, for example, Romeo and Juliet, where from the very
beginning of the play, we feel that all the passionate
force of young love is doomed to be broken by the iron
hand of irresistible circumstance. But the religious form
it took in Calvinism did not enter our poetry as a personal
element till the time of Cowper and Burns. It has
deeply influenced it ever since. And the manner in
which it worked was twofold. One was when the poet
accepted it and gave tragic importance to his life by it,
either by yielding to it in heartbroken humility, as Cow-
per; or by yielding to it in pride, since it marked him
from mankind, as Byron did. And in both these men
the emotions it roused were creative of poetry.

The. other mode in which it bore upon the poetic power
in men was in the hot hatred, the fierce emotion of anger
which it stirred in hearts full of love to men, either in
those who like Burns, disbelieved in it as having any-

thing to do with Christianity, or in those who like
oC
18 Theology in the English Poets.

Shelley, believed that it was Christianity and poured out
all the passion of their heart against it. Introduced by
Cowper as a personal question into our later poetry, no
one can doubt the influence it has had ; in fact, its intro-
duction into it has led to the whole question of the
relation of the soul to God becoming a distinct element
in English poetry up to the present day.

Again I ask you, on this doctrinal side of the question,
to look back to the critical school and to compare its
theological poetry with that of Cowper. In the fourth
act of Dryden’s “State of Innocence,” Gabriel and
Raphael and Adam discuss all the arguments which can
be urged on the subject of Fate and Freewill with the
greatest precision and clearness. But the matter is
treated wholly from the outside, as an abstract question
which interested the Poet intellectually. To Cowper the
question was one which tortured his heart; it was a
personal matter on which hung his whole life; and it
made all the difference to him between reason or madness.
In this matter also the whole poetic atmosphere is
changed, we are again in a different world,

I have now traced, and in brief outline only, the growth
of the devotional element in ow poetry from Dryden to
Cowper. With it statements about the theological element
have necessarily been mingled, but in accordance with the
plan of my lectures, and indeed in accordance with the
actual facts, [have spoken of the theological element as
it appeared when modified by the distinct personality of
the Poet. That ig one of the lines on which these lectures
Fron Pope to Cowper. 19

are to run; the theology of each Poet as created by his
special individuality.

There were two other lines of thought on which I
resolved to place these lectures ; the theology imported by
each poet into the poetry of Man, and the poetry of
Nature. For a poetry which had to do with all the ques-
tions which belong to man as a whole, and to the growth,
origin, and destiny of the individual man :—and a poetry
which had to do especially and separately with Nature,
with the whole of the outward world and all its parts,
with the emotions it stirred and the thoughts that we
gave to it, took clear form for the first time towards
the close of the eighteenth century, and has never
ceased to grow and to add branch to branch, up to
the present time. It may be truly said to date from
the publication of the “ Task” of Cowper in 1785, of the
Village of Crabbe in 1783, of the first Poems of Burns
in 1786. But nothing is born all in a moment in
this world, and the poetry which dealt specially with
Man, as well as that which dealt specially with Nature,
though they first became clearly defined in Cowper had
been slowly growing into form before him. The different
stages of the growth of each I must be permitted to sketch
with as much conciseness as possible. I will do that for
the poetry of Man to-day, in the rest of this Lecture.
In the following I shall do the same work for the poetry
of Nature, and then take up the Poets themselves, and
show how in each the poetry of Man, the poetry of
Nature, as well as their personal poetry, became tinged
by theology. In each Poet then we shall trace the

theology in his human, natural, and personal poetry.
a2
20 Theology in the English Poets.

Our object now is to trace the growth of the poetry of
Man up to the time of Cowper, when theology distinctly
entered into it.

In Dryden, Pope, Swift, Prior, Roscommon and the
rest, we find the searching and critical spirit of the
eighteenth century looking on man as an intellectual and
social being, and their poetry reflects with clearness the
leading thoughts about Man of that masculine and
vigorous time. They seek from the intellectual point
of view for an explanation of the problems which beset
us; they go on to ask how such circumstances as riches
and poverty, the follies of society and its oddities of taste,
bear upon his life ; they describe the variety of characters
in men and women. Even the new scientific discoveries
of the time, its credulity and scepticism are touched on
in this poetry, and an attempt is made in the “ Hissay on
Man” to reduce to a system the dim questionings with
regard to the spiritual nature which science and scepticism
had awakened.

Pope said that the proper study of mankind was Man.
But he approached that study from the side of the intel-
lect alone. It was by the criticism of the understanding,
not by the emotion of the heart that he worked on his subject.
The result was cold speculation and brilliant satire, and in
neither of those tempers is any one fit to write fairly or
nobly about the whole of Human Nature; though he is
fitted to write about that which Man does, or Man has,
up toa certain point. The surface of the ‘study of
mankind” is touched it may be in all its points, but
the writer does not penetrate into its depths. It is
just the difference between Ben Jonson and Shake-
From Pope to Cowper. 21

speare: the one not seriously caring for his characters,
but only how he may develope them; the other
loving, pitying, being personally indignant with his
characters : so that in the one we study not men but the
humours of men; in the other we study men, nay man-
kind. The one creates images of men and dresses them
and makes them play their part by strings upon his stage:
the other creates living men, and bids them act, and sits
by watching them with passion. There is the same kind
of difference between Pope’s study of man and that study
of him to which Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron have
accustomed us.

Again we find no large study of mankind as a whole in
Pope. It is classes of men whom we meet, not the con-
ception of the race. The idea of the Universal Man, of
one common mankind, rising above all distinctions of
clan, caste, race, and nation, did not exist in Pope’s time ;
we owe it to the Revolution. There were dreams of it,
suggestions, hints, but of the clear, concise, world-sub-
duing conception there is little or no trace; no real poetry
of Man in the true sense of the word existed. Whereas,
since Wordsworth’s time, it breathes in every English
Poem. In both the particular and universal view the
change is immense.

The same kind of study of Man lasted during Pope’s
life and after his death in 1744. It lives in John-
son’s London, 1738, and in his Vanity of Human Wishes,
1749, as observant and indignant satire; it lives in that
Poem of Akenside’s which continued the speculations of
Hutcheson and Shaftesbury. It was the spirit of Pope
enduring after Pope was gone, and even less than Pope
Ses Theology in the English Poets.

did Akenside bestow human emotion on his speculations.
But even before the death of Pope a change had begun.
Pope’s study of man did not carry him beyond the city ;
he has no interest in the rustic, in the uneducated, in the
relation of man to Nature apart from society, in the
past history of man, even of Englishmen. But, in 1726,
Thomson makes us touch the farmhouse and the labourer,
the traveller lost in the snow, the far-off lives of men of other
nations where Winter rules over half the year. We have got
out of England, as we have in Dyer’s Ruins of Rome in
1740. In Warton’s Poems, though his own personality over-
shadows everything, we again find ourselves among country
people, the milkmaid singing and the woodman at his
work. In the exquisitely pencilled ‘‘ Klegy ” of Gray we
are brought face to’ face with the ploughman, the rude
forefathers of the hamlet, the village Hampden, the
solitary who, far from cities and society—

Along the cool sequestered vale of life
Has kept the noiseless tenor of his way.

Again, the speculative study of Man, his origin, duties,
and destiny, from the point of view of the inquiring intel-
lect, has now passed away, and there is a tender, but some-
what sentimental treatment of Man, .as the subject of
the musing moralist, as the victim of the passions and
changes and ills of life, and ag listening to the soothing
or warning voice with which Nature speaks to him in
his enjoyment or his pain.

There is also a distinct delight shown in the historv of
Man in the Past, a thing almost impossible to the pre-
vious school in which the Present was so powerful that it
From Pope to Cowper. 23

filled all the view. Both the “ Bard” and the “Progress
of Poesy,” illustrate this new element. The poetry of
the two Wartons, about the same date, continually goes
over the past glories of the English nation, and Thomas
Warton’s History of English Poetry was but the begin-
ning of that vivid delight in what our fore-fathers did,
to which Chatterton afterwards gave a fresher life, and
which runs through all the minor Poets of the time.
This new interest in the men of the past—though it is
necessary to observe that it did not travel beyond the
men of our country, so as to become an interest in man-
kind—was afterwards stimulated by the influence of the
élder Pitt, whose whole life and work exalted England in
her own eyes.

The interest in Man was defective then in that it did
not embrace mankind. It had also lost, in losing Pope’s
interest in social life, and in the intellectual and specula-
tive side of human questions, and in its transference from
the town to the country, elements which were afterwards
to be revived. But though it lost something for the time,
it gained new elements, and in a few years after the death
of Pope we have seen that we are in a new poetic world upon
the subject. Still the interest even in Man in the country,
in a simpler, kinder, more rugged, human life, was not the
living, close, direct thing it afterwards became. It is the
distant, rather dainty interest nursed by college life, which
scholars, like Warton, or like Gray looking out on the world
from the window of Peterhouse, would be likely to take—a
quiet contemplative interest such as he describes in lines,
which, written in 1742, embody the spirit in which he
looked on Man,—
24 Theology in the English Poets.

Where’er the oak’s thick branches stretch

A broader, browner shade,
‘Where’er the rude and moss-grown beech

O’ercanopies the glade,

Beside some water’s rushy brink
With me the Muse shall sit and think

(At ease reclined in rustic state)
How vain the ardour of the Crowd,
How low, how little are the Proud,

How indigent the Great !

Still is the toiling hand of Care:

The panting herds repose ;

Yet hark ! how through the peopled air

The busy murmur glows!

The insect youth are on the wing,
Eager to taste the lonied spring

And float amid the liquid noon ;
Some lightly o’er the current skim,

Some show their gaily-gilded trim

Quick-glancing to the sun,

To Contemplation’s sober eye

Such is the race of Man:

And they that creep, and they that fly

Shall end where they began.

Alike the Busy and the Gay
But flutter through Life’s little day,

In Fortune’s varying colours drest :
Brushed by the hand of rough Mischance,
Or chilled by Age, their airy dance

They leave, in dust to rest.

Changed as that is from the spirit of Pope, it is a still
greater change to turn from its spirit to the stern severity
of Crabbe’s painting of the human life of the country in
the “ Parish Register.”

If we pass on from Gray a little further to Goldsmith’s
‘“‘ Traveller” in 1764 and to his “Village” in 1770,
we find that the village life is more homely, more truly
sketched, but that its ruder realities are hidden. It is
From Pope to Cowper. 25

the same sort of interest which Gainsborough took in his
rustic children and his cottages, the interest of the artist
more than of the man. But in the “ Traveller” a new
element is added to the poetry of Man—interest in other
peoples than the English people; the horizon of man-
kind has widened, and this enlargement of our poetic
interest in Man beyond the bounds of England which
began in Goldsmith, rapidly developed in Cowper,
and in the next age grew so intense in Wordsworth
that in order to save a great idea necessary as he thought
for the progress of the race, he wished in lines which
thrill with excitement, that the fleets and armies of
England might be beaten by the foreigner. It is perhaps
needless to say here that one of the causes of this wider
sympathy with man was the growth of prosperity and
wealth under the peaceful administration of Walpole.
Men had money to travel, and peace and new openings
for commerce made it easier to see the world.

In the meantime, the interest in the poor deepened.
Adam Smith, 1776, and afterwards others, set on foot a
series of inquiries which forced men to look sharply into
the relations of capital to labour, of landowners to tenants,
of the poor to the rich; and these, combining with the
sentiment which had been growing up for country life and
its indwellers, entered as a power into men’s hearts, and
naturally struck with emotional force upon the Poets; and
a few minor poems of the day served as heralds to the
intimate treatment of the life of the poor by Crabbe and
Cowper. Along with these, as a continuous subject, and
indeed always a poetic subject in England, were poems
that touched on or glorified Liberty. The change of which
26 Theology in the English Poets.

I speak enters into them in the way they altered from
vague declamations about English liberty to deliberate
attacks, for the sake of human liberty, on slavery and
oppression—either imposed by England on subject races,
or by nations beyond our doors on their own subjects.
We shall find this element in the change fully set forth by
Cowper.

We have now arrived at Cowper. After 1770, a
pause in poetic production took place, and not till more
than twenty years afterwards did the new school spring
to light along with the dawn of freedom. The interval
is filled with Cowper and Crabbe and Burns. Burns,
who stands somewhat apart from the influences of the
day, belongs to so different a poetic descent from that
of the English Poets that J shall leave him aside for
separate consideration; but on Cowper and Crabbe the
influences which led men to investigate the wrongs and
pains of the poor, to extend their human sympathies, to
be indignant with oppression, to see the Man in every
one, however miserable like the cottager, however deeraded
like the slave—fell with immense force, and became
creative of a new poetry of Man. The poetry of Man in
relation to intellect and fine society, the poetry of satire
and speculation, the sentimental poetry of Man, the
light and graceful treatment of the subject of the pastoral
man by Goldsmith—all have vanished; and in Crabbe,
in his Village, 1783, and in the Parish Register, 1807, we
are brought face to face with the sternest portraiture
of the crimes, the miseries, the starvation of the
labourer. We see the same passions moving him as
moved the fine gentlemen of Pope, and the scholars
From Pope to Cowper, 27

who exchanged letters with Gray, and the wits who met
Goldsmith at Johnson’s club; only the passions are
coarser and the sorrows uglier. We find in his tales,
not only the darker but the nobler side of this humble
life, its sacrifices, its struggles, its purity in temptation ;
and the effect of it all in deepening and widening human
sympathy cannot be overestimated. We are shown the
cottages of the poor, the life of the ploughman, the
bargeman, and the fisher; they are sketched, filled in
with an unrelenting hand. We are led into the dreadful
prisons which disgraced that time, but which Howard
had bettered already. We are brought over the wretched
hospitals, and find ourselves in the poorhouse, where the
neglected, the vain, and the extravagant were rudely
housed till death. Nothing is omitted, and as we turn
back fifty years, and read the Essay on Man, we rub our
eyes and ask, In what new world are we?

This is the history of the change in the Poetry of Man
from 1730 to 1790; and its literary and historical interest
is considerable. Enough has been said, for our purpose,
about this human element in Crabbe. It needs but a
slight touch, for it was not tinged in him by any special
religious colour. His theology was not individual but
conventional, though it was profoundly felt. But when
the new poetry of Man was directly connected with the
individual emotions of a religious mind like Cowper’s on
the subjects of theology—and doctrinal as he was, his
heart ran continually beyond doctrine—it becomes of
special interest to us, and of still more special interest
when we find that his religion was one of the causes of its
28 Theology in the English Poets.

much wider development. When therefore I have sketched
in my next lecture the growth of the poetry of Nature to
the same point as I have brought to-day the poetry of
Man, I shall begin the lectures on the separate Poets with
Cowper.
from Pope to Cowper. 29

LECTURE If,

—eeo—.

THE Poetry of Nature which I have already defined, and
which is a distinct thing in our poetry after 1790, did not
come into being without previous warning, and the object
of this lecture is to sketch its growth from the time of
Pope to the time of Wordsworth. In the previous lecture
I sketched the growth of the poetry of Man, and of the
doctrinal and theological elements in our poetry, and
sketched them separately for the sake of greater clearness ;
but in this lecture I shall throw the theological and
poetical subjects together, and while I trace the growth
of the poetry of Nature, trace along with it, step by step,
the theology that accompanied it, or the elements in it
which resisted the presence of a theology.

The poetry which speaks directly of Nature for its own
sake is not to be found in England till the time of
Cowper when it distinctly began, is not developed till
Wordsworth when it rapidly reached its full growth.
Chaucer’s landscape is for the most part conventional,
though what there is of it is touched with the dewy
brightness and affection of the Poet. But he saw but little,
and nothing solely for its own sake. The Elizabethan
Poets introduce bits of landscape, but these are chiefly as
30 Theology in the English Poets.

a background for the setting off of their own feelings or
for the display of their characters ; and though the natural
poetry of Shakespeare has his quality of perfectness, it
has little personal love of Nature. It is not till we get to
Milton, to the “ Allegro” and “Penseroso,” that we find
any pure natural description, any deliberate choice of
natural beauty as a thing to be studied for its own sake.
When we arrive at the Critical School, Nature is wholly
put out of the field. It is looked at, when it is at all
touched, from the windows of the suburbs; the country
is despised and life in it considered inconceivably dull.
Pope condoles with those who are driven from the city,
who dream in the rural shade of triumphs in the town
and wake to find the vision fled, left in ‘lone woods
or empty walls.” The descriptions in his pastorals have
no resemblance to Nature, and when he steps aside to
praise natural beauty, it is when it has been subjected to
the critical hand of Art. It was characteristic of the
time that Nature had to undergo the same sort of polish
as verse. Wild Nature was as bad as wild poetry, and
the art of the landscape gardener must be employed to
check her extravagance and lessen her horrors. We will
try Pope, however, when he describes a piece of pure land-
scape that he had seen,—Windsor Forest, in the pas-
torals :—

There, interspers’d in lawns aud op’ning glades

Thin trees arise that shun each other’s shades.

Here in full light the russet plaing extend :

here wrapt in clouds the bluish hills ascend.

Yili the wild heath displays her purple dyes,

And nidst the desert fruitful hills arise,

That crowned with tufted trees and springing .orn,
Like vviduul isles the sable waste adorn.
from Pope to Cowper. 31

That is concoction, not composition; it is full of stock
phrases, and it is plain that Pope made it up in his study
with no recollected pleasure of the scene, with even a
recollected distress at the distance he was then from town,
which expresses itself in such absurd terms as the desert
aud the sable waste. Indeed, one can scarcely imagine
the physical discomfort, the confusion of mind, the bore-
dom which Pope, and Belinda and her court would have
suffered if they had been placed side by side with Words-

worth,—

when from the naked top
Of some bold headland, he beheld the sur
Rise up and bathe the world in light !

or asked, with Byron—

Where mortal foot hath ne’er or rarely been,
To climb-the trackless mountain all unseen,
With the wild flock that never seek a fold.
Alone o’er steeps and foaming falls to lean.

But if we can imagine it for a moment, we have some
idea of the change in the temper of society with regard to
Nature, some cause for wonder at the new world into
which, since the days when Pope wrote, we have been
brought by the Poets.

The Nature then of which Pope thought was a wholly
different thing from that which we conceive; and the the-
ology which he connected with it was just as different. The
Nature of which Wordsworth conceived, the living things
of earth, and air, and water, that spoke to him like friends
and moved by their “ own sweet will,” was separate from
Man, and God spoke through it to Man. In Pope’s idea
it was mingled up as a part of the system of the universe
32 Theology in the English Poets.

with Man, and both had the same kind of life from the
immanent presence of God. In fact, the Nature of which
Pope spoke was nothing more than that order of the
universe which the recent scientific activity had begun to
impress on cultivated men; and in that order, and not
in the disorder of revealed Religions with their super-
natural interferences, God, the Great. Unknown, so far as
Man could presume to scan Him, was most clearly to be
seen. Here is his view in well-known lines, which seem
but are not Pantheistic, for Pope, as in the line, “¢ The
workman from his work distinct was known,”’ takes care
always to separate the first cause from the things caused.

All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul,;

That changed through all, and yet in all the same ;
Great in the earth, as in th’ ethereal frame ;
Warms in the sua, refreshes in the breeze,

Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees,
Lives through all life, extends through all extent,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent :

Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part ;

As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart ;

As full, as perfect in vile man that mourns

As the rapt seraph, that adores and burns :

To him no high, no low, uo great, no small—

He fills, he bounds, connects and equals all.

That is not the Nature we love or we know; we give a
wholly different meaning to the term; and we approach
Nature in a different way. Pope, looking on it as a great
system, considered it from his study with all the means
of the observing and inquiring intellect, and never
thought of its beauty as a source of pleasure. We look
on it as the storehouse of some of our deepest pleasures ;
From Pope to Cowper, a3

we consider it with a love which may be called passionate,
and we study it by all the means with which emotion
furnishes us. Owing to this—and especially to its being
seen as separate from us—we are forced, when we come
to think of God in connection with it, to have a theology
of Nature wholly distinct from this of Pope’s, and we shall
see how in Wordsworth the whole of the Natural Theology
of the eighteenth century disappears. It is this change
we shall trace to-day.

It was during the life-time of Pope that the change
began; it was when the English heart had been almost
exiled from the woods and hills, that the door into the
Paradise in which we have wandered with Coleridge,
Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, and a hundred other
lovers of the wild world of earth and air and sea, was
opened for our entrance. In 1726, nearly twenty years
before the death of Pope, James Thomson published his
“ Winter,” and in 1780, the whole of the “Seasons” was
given tothe world. The greater part of it must have been,
so far as its feeling went, incomprehensible to Pope. That
‘recollected love,’ which Thomson said he embodied in
his descriptions of Nature, could never have been felt by
a single one of the followers of the Critical School.

It is true that the taint of the artificial spirit lingered in
his poetry, but for all that it was a new world to the
English people. The woods, the rivers, the moors, the
cornfields, the mountain floods, the summer skies, the
tempests, all the broad aspects of Nature were seen and
detailed with some real care and affection. One sees that
he is often painting directly from the scene; that some-

times his monotonous, and turgid style is forgotten that
D
34 Theology in the English Poets.

the beauty and peace of the outward world bring him so
much emotion that his verse becomes spontaneous and
tender. But for the most part he wants the simplicity of
description which passionate love of Nature produces, and,
above all, the sweetness and pathetic truth that comes of
self-consciousness being lost in the life of Nature. We
stand only on the threshold of the new world when we
read Thomson. He has none of that solitary emotion for
Nature herself which complains and creates and trembles
with its own excitement in Shelley; none of that intense
quiet of enjoyment which broods like sunlight over
Wordsworth’s soul when he steps into a nook in the
woods, and treads lightly lest he should disturb its living
spirit.

For there is as much difference between the fecling of
Thomson about Nature and the conventional coldness of
his descriptions, and the feeling of a poet like Shelley,
as there was between Thomson and Pope. It is worth
while to compare them at the same work. Here is
Thomson treating an autunin noon,—

For now the day
O’er heaven and earth diffused, grows warm and high,
Infinite splendour ! wide investing all.
How still the breeze! save what the filmy threads
Of dew evaporate brushes from the plain.
How clear the cloudless sky, how deeply tinged
With a peculiar blue! The ethereal arch
How swelled immense, amid whose azure throned
The radiant sun how gay—how calm below
The gilded earth !

Contrast the note of that—how heavy, elaborate and yet
how true in parts, how unemotional—with this, and think
how wonderful the change,—
From Pope to Cowper. 35

Noon descends around me now:

"Tis the noon of Autumn’s glow,
When a soft and purple mist

Like a vaporous amethyst,

Or an air-dissolvéd star

Mingling light and fragrance, far
From the curved horizon’s bound
To the point.of heaven’s profound,
Fills the overflowing sky :

And the plains that silent lie
Underneath : the leaves unsodden
Where the infant Frost has trodden
With his morning-wingéd feet
Whose bright print is gleaming yet ;
And the red and golden viues
Piercing with their trellised lines
The rough, dark-skirted wilderness;
The dun and bladed grass no less
Pointing from this hoary tower

In the windless air ; the flower
Glimmering at my feet ; the line
Of the olive-sandalled Apennine

In the south dimly islanded ;

And the Alps, whose snows are spread
High between the clouds and sun;
And of living things each one ;

And my spirit, which so long
Darkened this swift stream of song,—
Interpenetrated lie

By the glory of the sky ;

Be it love, light, harmony,

Odour, or the soul of all

Which from heaven like dew doth fall,
Or the mind which feeds this verse
Peopling the lone universe.

It is not a development of the former, it is a different
thing altogether. In Thomson, the poet stands apart
and apostrophises Nature ; in Shelley, the poet is absorbed
into Nature, and his voice is the voice of Nature herself.
Whatever theology Shelley had about Nature would

D2
36 Theology in the English Poets.

naturally, owing to this interpenetration of himself and
her, become Pantheistic; or would be content, since delight
was so great, not to know and not to care whether it were
love from without, or his own mind from within, that
made or peopled the universe ; but Thomson’s theology
of Nature, because he was not interpenetrated by her,
would recognize a separate First Cause. His nearness to
Pope would also lead him to share in the systematic view
of the universe, but this would be deeply modified in him
by his close study of natural beauty. He sees the world
no longer only as a great order under a great Governor.
He sees it as full of varied landscapes of infinite beauty,
and each of these as the work of God—as revelations of
His character. He hovers round, though he does not
clearly touch, the thought of Nature as a living personal
image of God. He has begun that separation of Nature
from Man which led afterwards to the half pantheistic
theology of Nature that Wordsworth worked out, to the
wholly pantheistic theology of Shelley.

The impulse given by Thomson to the study of Nature
went on increasing. That migration of the poets from
the town to the country, of which I spoke, began: men
visited the more accessible parts of England and recorded
their impressions; Dyer’s ‘‘ Grongar Hill” is the record
of a landscape in South Wales; his “ Fleece,” and Somer-
ville’s ‘‘Chase,” are both descriptive poems, but they are
too slight to contain any theology of Nature. Foreign
travel next enlarged the sphere of love of Nature. Every-
one knows the letters of Gray, and remembers the lucid
simplicity and directness, mingled with the fastidious sen-
timent of a scholar, of his description of such scenes as
Fron Pope to Cowper. an

the Chartreuse. That is a well-known description, but
those in his journal of a “Tour in the North” have
been neglected, and they are especially interesting since
they go over much of the country in which Wordsworth
dwelt, and of which he wrote. They are also the first
conscious effort—and in this he is a worthy forerunner of
Wordsworth—to describe natural scenery with the writer's
eye upon the scene described, and to describe it in simple
and direct phrase, in distinction to the fine writing that
was then practised. And Gray did this intentionally in
the light prose journal he kept, and threw by for a time
the refined carefulness and the insistance on human
erection which he thought necessary in poetic description
of Nature. In his prose then, though not in his poetry,
we have Nature loved for her own sake.*

* I insert here two of these descriptions ; they may pcrhaps induce
some to read Gray’s letters, aud few letters in the English language are
so good :—‘‘ I walked out under the conduct of my landlord to Borrodale.
The grass was covered with « hoar frost, which soon melted and ex-
haled in a thin bluish smoke. Crossed the meadows obliquely, catching
a diversity of views among the hills over the lake and islands, and
changing prospect at every ten paces ; left Cockshut and Castlehill (which
we formerly mounted) behind me, and drew near the foot of Walla-
crag, whose bare and rocky brow cut perpendicularly down above 400
feet, as I guess, awfully overlooks the way ; our path here tends to the
left, and the ground gently rising, and covered with a glade of scat-
tering trees and bushes on the very margin of the water, opens both
ways the most delicious view that my eyes ever beheld. Behind you are
the magnificent heights of Walla-crag ; opposite lie the thick hanging
woods of Lord Egremont, and Newland valley, with green and smiling
fields embosomed in the dark cliffs ; to the left, the jaws of Borrodale,
with that turbulent chaos of mountain behind mountain, rolled in con-
fusion; beneath you, and stretching far away to the right, the shining
purity of the lake, just ruffled by the breeze enough to show it is alive,
reflecting woods, rocks, fields, and inverted tops of mountains, with the
38 Theology in the English Poets.

It was different, as I say, in his poetry. The exquisite
choice and studious simplicity of the natural description
in such poems as the “Elegy,” and the “Ode to Eton
College” is the result of Art, more than of the pure
imagination ; and Gray weighed every word, especially
every adjective, till he reached what I suppose to be his
ideal—that every line was to suggest a sentiment and a
landscape. We feel, then, too much the art and too
little the emotion in his work; but then work like this
introduced an ideal of style and expression into our
poetical language about Nature—a demand for perfec-
tion—which it has never since lost, but which it never,

white buildings of Keswick, Crosthwaite Church, and Skiddaw for a
back-ground at a distance.”

‘Mr. Gray to Dr. Wharton.

“Past by the little chapel of Wiborn, out of which the Sunday con-
gregation were then issuing. Past » beck near Dunmailrouse, and
entered Westmorcland a second time, now begin to see Helm-crag, dis-
tinguished from its rugged neighbours, not so much by its height, as by
the strange, broken outline of its top, like some gigantic building de-
molished, and the stones that composed it flung across cach other in wild
confusion. Just beyond it opens one of the sweetest landscapes that art
ever attempted to imitate. The bosom of the mountains spreading here
into a broad bason, discovers in the midst Grassmere- Water ; its margin is
hollowed into small bays with bold eminences, some of them rocks, some
of soft turf, that half conceal and vary the figure of the little lake they
command. From the shore a low promontory pushes itself far into the
water, and on it stands a white village with the parish church rising in
the midst of it; hanging enclosures, corn-fields, and meadows green as
an emerald, with their trees, hedges, and cattle, fill up the whole space
from the edge of the water. Just opposite to you is a large farm-house
at the bottom of a steep, smooth Jawn, embosomed in old woods, which
climb half-way up the mountain side, and discover above them a broken
live of crags, that crown the scene, Not a single red-tile, no flaring

eutleman’s house or garden walls, break in upon the repose of this little
unsuspected paradise; but all is peace, rusticity, and happy poverty in its
neatest and most becoming attire.”
from Pope to Cowper. 39

except in Milton, possessed before. After lines like these,
for example, in which every word tells,—

There pipes the woodlark, and the songthrush there

Scatters his loose notes iu the waste of air,
it was quite impossible to go back wilfully to the careless
profusion of epithets, and the hazarded meanings of the
Elizabethan writers. Gray established a standard of
careful accuracy in natural description which has never
left our poetry, and in the great writers of our century
nothing is more delightful than the mingling of imagi-
nation and emotion with a close and minute truthfulness
in their work on Nature.

We find the same exquisite choice and care in Collins.
His “Ode to Evening” is as finished and concise in
description as it is finished and subtle in sentiment. The
key of feeling in which it is written is not for one
moment transposed. The landscape and the emotion of
the Poet interpenetrate one another, so that a pleasure
made up of both blended into one impression is given to
the reader. Evening, ‘‘ maid composed,” is to teach him
some softened strain,—

Whose numbers, stealing through thy darkening vale

May not unseemly with its stillness suit.
Every epithet is chosen and weighed by an art which,
first submitting itself to the work of observation, and
then letting emotion work on the materials, at last creates
such a distant landscape as this,—

Or if chill, blustering winds or driving rain

Prevent my will'ng feet, be mine the hut

That frum the mountain’s side,
Views wilds and swelling floods,
40 Theology tn the English Poets.

And hamlets brown, and dim-discovered spires ;
And hears their simple bell ; and marks o’er all
Thy dewy fingers draw
The gradual dusky veil.

But in neither Gray nor Collins is Nature, I do not say
first, but on an equality with Man, in interest. Nothing
is distinctly written for her and her alone. On the con-
trary, Man is always the centre, the landscape clusters
round him ; it is used as a means of pleasure for him, or
as echoing his feelings, or as an illustration of moral
lessons useful to him. It is never the first thing in the
poetry. And Gray put it himself in this position. For,
in writing to Beattie about the Minstrel, he says, “As
to description, I have always thought that it made the
most graceful ornament of poetry, but never ought to
make the subject.”” I need scarcely say how different it
is in the poetry of Wordsworth, in which man and his
emotions are frequently left out altogether. And yet it is
worth saying, for it was this predominance of man in the
poetry of which we speak, that prevented in it any dis-
tinct theology of Nature. We know that both Gray and
Collins were religions men, but there is not a trace in
their poetry of any religious feeling connected with
Nature.

The next step in this poetry of Nature is a curious
one. Both Gray and Collins in the midst of natural
scenery speak of Man, and not of themselves. But the
Wartons and Logan, and others of that time, when they
retire to the woods or hills, speak of themselves alone.
They see only their own feelings in Nature, and use her
as the mirror to reflect their melancholy and morbid
From Pope to Cowper. 41

moods. They are without any joy or gratitude for her
brightness and life. Seeking only sympathy for their
spleen, they prefer darksome shades, and gloomy valleys,
and autumn in its decay, and, above all, night. Nor can
they bear company; they fly from the face of man to the
solitudes of Nature, and find there not misery, as Pope
would have found, or rapture, as Wordsworth would have
found, but a sentimental and faded pleasure.
‘Oh tell,” cries Warton,—

How rapturous the joy, to melt
To melody’s assuasive voice; to bend
The uncertain step along the midnight mead
And pour your sorrows to the pitying moon ;
By many a slow trill from the bird of woe
Oft interrupted ; in embowering woods,
By darksome brook to muse, and there forget
The solemn dulness of the tedious world.

How remote from Pope! but in the following descrip-
tion of the delights of the woodman’s life, note the
genuine enthusiasm for beauty and the fresher feeling
which, with all their sentiment, these poets did not want.

When morning’s twilight-tinctured beam
Strikes their low thatch with slanting gleam,
They rove abroad in ether blue

To dip the scythe in fragrant dew ;

The sheaf to bind, the beech to fell

That nodding shades a craggy dell.
Midst gloomy glades in warbles clear
Wild Nature’s sweetest notes they hear ;
Or green untrodden banks they view
The hyacinth’s neglected hue ;

Each native charm their steps explore

Of Solitude’s sequestered store.

‘We find then the Poets bringing to Nature that per-
42 Theology in the English Poets.

sonal element which we traced in the devotional poetry:
and though they only saw themselves in Nature, a kind of
personal affection for her could not but begin to grow in
poetry. They were led to look more directly at Nature,
though it was only to find additional food for their own
pensiveness; they were led to look at the smaller beau-
ties of Nature, to count the primroses on a woodland
bank, to mark the changing lights on a mountain pool.
And for the first time the pleasure of being alone with
Nature in her solitudes now became a distinct element in
modern poetry. It was freed from its sentimentality by
Wordsworth and others ; it was freed also from its habit
of self-consciousness. The new Poets felt the frank joy
of Nature, and could not burden it with faded sentiment;
they felt ravished by her beauty and could not think of
themselves. Logan or Warton walking by a brook would
have compared it with the sorrows and solitude of their
hearts: Wordsworth writes as if from another world than
theirs—hearing no echo of himself or of human pain in
the rapture of life that he feels around him by the brook-
side,—
The spirit of enjoyment and desire

And hopes and wishes, from all living things

Went circling, like a multitude of sounds—
* * * * *

up the brook:
I roamed, in the confusion of my heart,
Alive to all things, and forgetting all.

Lost, you see, in the gaiety and life of Nature !

It is no wonder where self intrnded so much into
natural contemplation as with these Poets, that one finds
no religion linked to their love of Nature. It is no
From Pope to Coziper. 43

wonder that, when self, as in Wordsworth, is lost, one
finds religion.

The next step, in the order of growth in the poetry of
Nature, is made by Goldsmith. We possess from him
clear descriptions of natural scenery, uninfluenced by
human feeling, untroubled by moralizing thought. The
landscapes in the ‘ Traveller”? are pure pictures; but
they are wholly uncoloured with emotion. Not for a
moment does he feel such love to a place for its own
sake as Wordsworth expresses forty years after the
‘Traveller’? was published, about a glade of water and
one green field,—

And if a man should plant his cottage near,
Should sleep beneath the shelter of its trees,
And blend its waters with his daily meal,
He would so love it, that in his death hour
Its image would survive among his thoughts,

Nor is another touch in the same Poem—
This spot was made by Nature for herself --

less remarkable as a proof of the great change of thought
and feeling about Nature between Goldsmith and Words-
worth. Goldsmith coldly delineates the landscape, and
never dreams that it may have a life of its own, or share
in the life of a spirit. Wordsworth thinks of the whole
of Nature as a living person, and of a landscape as dwelt
in, even chosen as a special retreat, by Nature, through
a special love of it. It is all the distance between a dead
and a living universe, and with the conception of a living
universe our true poetic theology of Nature begins. But
we could not get to that theology till we had conceived
44 Theology in the English Poets.

Nature as having a life distinct from ours, and Goldsmith
made one step forward to that, when he freed the land-
scape in his descriptions from the burden of human
feeling which Gray, Collins, Beattie, and Warton had
imposed on it.

The next step, and an immense one, was made by
Burns, Crabbe, and Cowper.

Leaving Burns aside for separate treatment, I pass
on to the two others in whose work we have for the
first time Nature distinctly studied and loved for her
own sake. The moralizing of Gray on the, landscape,
the transference of emotion to it by pasts senti-
mental note of Warton, have passed away, .and we see
Nature as a whole, and separated from Man.

Crabbe’s poetry of Nature is as direct in description as
his poetry of Man. He was a botanist and mineralogist,
and his close study of flowers and stones made him look
accurately into all things. He paints the very blades
of grass on the common, and the trail of the shell-fish
on the sand. It is the introduction into our poetry of
that minute observation, and delight in minute things
in Nature, which is so remarkable in the subsequent
poets, which led Coleridge to paint in words the dancing
of the sand at the bottom of a tiny spring, and Words-
worth the daisy’s shadow on the naked stone, and
Shelley the almost invisible globes of vapour which the
sun sucks from a forest pool. The difference is that
Crabbe writes without the imagination which confers life
on the things seen, while the later poets, believing that
all Nature was alive, conceived a living spirit in the sand,
the daisy, and the vapour. And this distinction, as we
From Pope to Cowper, 45

shall see, has its force in relation to the poetical theology
of Nature.

Cowper’s natural painting is yt like Crabbe’s, pre-
Raphaelite. He paints broad landscapes, and his range
is as extensive as the scenery he lived among, and often
goes beyond it, neither does he disdain minuteness. He
also loved Nature for her own sake, and if Crabbe rode,
as we are told, sixty mifes in twenty-four hours for the
sake of catching one glimpse of the sca, Cowper speaks
of the love of Nature as an inextinguishable thirst in
man, and bringing his religion to bear on it, declares that
this love was infused by God into Man at the creation.

Therefore now, for the first time in English Poetry, we
have got three things—Nature studied as a whole, Nature
loved for her own sake, and therefore Nature conceived as
a distinct subject for poetical treatment.

And when this was done, a distinct Theology of Nature,
in our sense of the word, became for the first time pos-
sible. Pope had, as we have seen, his own Natural
Theology. It was of God’s relation to the great whole
conceived of as a system which appealed to the intellect
and its admiration: and this great whole involved Man
and Nature together. When the Poets who came after
him little by little divided Nature from Man for separate
consideration, and described and dwelt on separate por-
tions of her beauty, they lost the idea of Nature as a
whole, and that had to be recovered before a theology of
Nature was possible. When it was recovered, as it was
by Wordsworth, it was a different conception from that
of Pope. Man had been taken out of it. It is plain that
as long as Nature was only loved for the feclings it awoke
46 Theology in the English Poets.

in Man, or for the lessons it gave him, he could not help
mingling it up with himself, and there could be no
theology of it whichq@gas not also a theology of Man.
But when it began to be loved for its own sake as sepa-
rate from us, the poets began to ask, how is God related
to it? what is it in Nature which we love? what is the
One Spirit in this mighty wh@e which spcaks to us in
another voice than that which we hear in our heart ?

Again, as long as isolated landscapes and things in
Nature were alone described, no conception of the whole
was formed. When it was, the Poet naturally asked,
what is the source of this Oneness of life, in whom is this
whole contained? And out of the effort to reply to these
questions the distinct theology of Nature in our poetry
took its rise.

Moreover, the new attitude of man towards the whole
of Nature tended in the poets to make the new the-
ology religious. It was not the attitude of those who
reasoned like Pope on what they saw, it was the attitude
of those who loved, and were content alone to love. And
the love ended in worship. Some, like Shelley, not be-
lieving in revealed religion, not even being Deists, created
an all-pervading Spirit in the world, and would not call
it God, nor give it personality, but called it Love and
Life, and in the love and worship that they gave it found
their religion, and had the emotions of religion. It was
not the great Order of Pope which awoke their intellec-
tual admiration, it was the animating Love in Nature
which stirred their heart. Others, like Wordsworth,
believing in God, saw Him in the loveliness and ten-
derness and quiet that they loved, and worshipped not
from Pope to Cowper. 47

the Author of a great system whom they dared not scan,
but a Divine Spirit in the Universe—not necessarily per-
sonal there, though personal in g@u—and said, “ This
Presence which disturbs me with the joy of elevated
thoughts, this Wisdom and Beauty, is revealing itself to
me. Ican listen, I can understand its voice. It is in
Nature the same voice, though in a different language,
which belongs to God my Father in my heart, and the
work it is doing on me is a work of education. Not by
reason but by feeling, not by admiration but by love, I
make its lessons mine. Therefore I shall give myself
wholly, when I am with Nature, to absolute self-forgetful
love of her.”” In that way the theology of Nature became
religious, and that reacted in turn on the poetical con-
templation of Nature, and made it more loving and more
intense.

We shall find all this in Wordsworth, but we only find
its beginning in Crabbe and Cowper. They had lost, in
dividing Man from Nature, Pope’s thought of a life
immanent in the whole order of things. And in their
theology of Nature they were driven to think of it as only
‘dull matter” in Cowper’s phrase, but matter subject to
laws which God had ordained. When they looked then at
natural things from the Poet’s point of feeling, they saw
their beauty as the result of this order, and referred the
whole to God who directed it from without. Nature was
a machine which God had set in motion, but it moved
without any living consciousness of its own motion.

The last step, therefore, in the poetic theology of
Nature had not then been made. The Poets had not
reached the stage in which they were forced, not only by
48 Theology in the English Poets.

their own feelings, but also by the needs of their art, to
conceive of the universe beyond themselves as living.
Crabbe made no advange towards it; his was the mecha-
nical theory alone of God and the universe. But Cowper,
though he held the same theory for the most part, made
one step towards the higher view, and he made it through
his religion. His intense personality forced him, when
under poetic emotion, to lay aside the mechanical theory,
and we find passages where he ceases to interpose
laws between Nature and God. He transferred from
his theological creed the doctrine of the personal super-
intendence of God over every human life to the realm
of Nature, and bringing God directly into contact with
it, declared that He maintained its course by an unre-
mitting act. How else could matter seem as if it were

alive,—

unless impelled
To ceaseless service by a ceaseless force,
And under pressure of some conscious cause.
The Lord of all, Himself through all diffused,
Sustains and is the Life of all that lives.
Nature is but the name of an effect
Whose cause is God.

But his special personal theology which abode in worship
of Christ, carried him still further; and he makes Christ
Himself as the Eternal Word, as the acting Thought of
God—the ruler of the universe, and the author of its
forms.
One spirit, His

Who wore the plaited thorns with bleeding brows,

Rules universal Nature. Not a flower

But shows some touch in freckle, strvak, or stain,

Of His unrivalled pencil. He inspires

Their balmy odours, and imparts their hues,
From Pope to Cowper. 49

And bathes their eyes with nectar, and includes
In grains as countless as the seaside sands
The forms with which he sprinkles all the earth,

We have now made, you observe, a step further. Nature,
it is true, is not yet alive, but a spirit of life is now in it,
separate from it, but working in it. So near, in fact,
have we got to the conception of Nature. as alive, that
Cowper is betrayed unconsciously into phrases which
mingle God up with the universe and make it living.
The lines above, which speak of the diffusion of God
through all, are repeated in idea in this other phrase:

There lives and works
A soul in all things, and that soul is God.

This is a contradiction of his position of a God wholly
distinct from the universe, but it marks the transition
to the last step in the poetic idea of Nature. It is
the conception of Nature as a living Being to whom
affection was due, who could of herself awake feeling and
thought in Man, whom we could love as we love our
fellow-men, who lived her own life and had conscious
pleasure in it—it is this conception which unconsciously
in Cowper began to tremble into being. It sprang into
full being in Wordsworth, and then, when Nature was
conceived of as alive, its theology took a new form, or
rather several forms—each modified by the personal
theology or philosophy of the Poet—in the poetry of
England.

I shall trace that through Wordsworth and Shelley;
we shall see how it influenced or did not influence the

poetry of Byron and Keats; I shall mark the transitional
E
50 Theology in the English Poets.

position of Coleridge with regard to it; but before I
enter upon it, I must discuss, not only how far Cowper
carried the poetry of Man and how he made it theo-
logical, but also how far his theology influenced his
personal poetry. That will form the subject of my next
Lecture.
Ju Couper, ie

LECTURE III.
COWPER.

Trracep in my first lecture the growth of the Poetry of
Man from the critical school to Cowper. In Cowper's
hands, it took a much wider development. I only
laid down the larger lines of its growth, omitting for
the sake of clearness a number of branch lines, such
as that of the new interest taken in the romantic past,
which, touched by Macpherson in his ‘“ Ossian,” and by
Chatterton in his forgeries, was afterwards fully worked
out in narrative poetry by Sir Walter Scott: such as the
ballad, which chose a short narrative of human passion
and related it with simplicity and intensity—or the
shorter lyric, which in its treatment of a passing phase
of meditative or violent passion of the heart, and in its
strict limitation of itself within that phase, so as to
preserve what is called lyrical unity, is strictly analogous
to the hymn in its treatment of a sudden and transient
phase of the life of spiritual feeling.

These and others I pass by—though one sees how
largely they entered the work of the pocts on Man—
because theology of any kind would not be likely to
intrude into them.

I remain close then to the large lines I have spoken
E2
52 Theology in the English Poets.

of; and my object in the first part of this lecture is, to
show how largely Cowper extended the poetry of Man,
and how it was influenced, and in him indeed drenched
with theology.

I approach the subject by asking where we find him
writing, and the question has its meaning. We find
him retired in the heart of a very quiet country. The slow
eddying Ouse flowed close to his dwelling through its
willow-haunted meadows; it accompanied his walks, and
its quiet movement seems to flow through his poetry.
Day after day, Yardley Wood and the park of the Throck-
mortons saw the silent poet-face moving amidst their
trees. But little society disturbed that sequestered life;
few were the men and fewer the women whom he met;
he companied with sheep and birds, with his hares and
his spaniel, till he grew to know them as his friends ;
and one would say that in such a life the poetry of
Man was not likely to flourish, nor was a wide view of
mankind possible. Was it probable that this’ lawyer's
clerk, who had made a hopeless failure of his public life,
should say more of human nature and strike deeper into
the world of men than the brilliant Londoner, Pope, or
the courtly scholar, Gray—that the voice which spoke of
Man from the solitude of the country should say more
than the voice which spoke of him from the crowded
society of the city ?

In one point certainly this rural retirement spoiled the
largeness of Cowper’s view. He saw cities and their evils
through the exaggeration of distance, and in that glare of
morality in which sin is so magnified that the good which
balances it is lost. His doctrinal views had also power
du Cowper. 53

over him and he saw the curse which rested on man and
nothing else, when he looked upon the city. It was dif-
ferent when he turned his eyes upon the village and the
country poor. Seeing clearly their evil he also saw their
good, and it is with some naiveté that he imputes more
than half the evil in the country to the influence of those
who drift thither from the town. But whether in the
country or the town, Cowper’s religion led him to trace
all moral guilt and folly to the world’s rejection of Christ.

But the point I wish to draw your attention to is, that
unlike the town poet of the past to whom the dwellers in
the country are nothing, we have now the country poet
deeply interested in the life of towns as well as in the life
around him. It is no longer classes of men which awake
sympathy, nor special societies; it is no longer the pas-
sionate or the moral or the intellectual side of human
nature, each alone, on which the poet dwells,—it is the
whole of mankind, it is the whole of human nature.

The truth is, the first swell of the great wave which put
Man in the foremost place and interest, Man independent
of rank and caste and convention and education, Man in
his simple elements, was now flowing over Europe. Poets
are quick to feel, and it reached the quiet Cowper in his
hermitage, as it reached the lowland lad who,

in his glory and his joy,
Followed his plough along the mountain side,

and for the first time, as one smells the brine before one
sees the ocean, we scent in English poetry, too distinctly
to be explained away, the air of those ideas of which the
French Revolution was the most local and the most
54 Theology in the English Poets.

violent outburst. For the first time an attempt is made
in poetry to cover the whole range of Man, to think of
Man as one people; to spread poetical interest over all
who wear a human face. And it was done, as is com-
monly the case when the impulse is received from an idea
which has not yet taken any political form, quite uncon-
sciously. Cowper talked as naturally of a// men as Pope
did of one of two classes of men: he asks how le and any
man that lives could be strangers to each other; he con-
ceives of his poetic work as for the service of mankind ;
and such an aim was now for the first time possible. A
universal idea of Man had passed from political Philo-
sophers to the people, and the undefined emotion it stirred
in the people was felt and thrown into form by the poets.

But the revolutionary idea of the unity of Man was in
Cowper’s mind grounded on a theological one, on God as
the common Maker of Man. He speaks of “ the link of
brotherhood, by which one common Maker bound him to
the Kind.” And his work for men was to make them out
of sin and death into life with God, for they are

Bone of my bone, and kindred souls to mine,

To this religious element of an universal brotherhood in
God is to be traced the large range of his human view. He
looked abroad and saw all men related to God, it mattered
not of what nation, caste, or colour. As such they had equal
rights and equal duties in a spiritual country of which all
were citizens ; for as he writes, the limiting’ power of his
doctrinal theology departs and the individual theology of
the poet who sympathizes with all men, takes the upper
hand. Last, west, north, and south, his interest flew.
In Cowper. 55

In his satires he touches, not with savage bitterness, but
with a gentleness which healed while it lashed, on nearly
every phase of human life in England; on the Universi-
ties and the Schools, the Hospitals and the Prisons; on
cities and villages; on the statesman, the clergyman,
the lawyer, the soldier, the man of science, the critic,
the writer for the press, the pleasure - seeker, the
hunter, the musician, the epicure, the card-player, the
ploughman, the cottager, and fifty others. Their good
side, their follies, their vices, are sketched and ridiculed
and praised. The range of his interest was as wide as
human life, and as he sketched, he saw as the one ideal
and the one remedy for all—the Cross of Christ. What-
ever we may think of his religion or the manner of it,
there is no doubt but that it indefinitely extended his
poetic sympathy, and that in this extension of sympathy
we find ourselves in another world altogether than that
of Dryden, Pope, or Gray. It is no longer intellectual
interest in man, or sentimental interest; it ig vivid,
personal, passionate.

It went beyond classes of men, it was an interest in his
nation; but he derived his patriotism and drew the
passion with which he informed it from the connection of
his country with God. It was God who was the King of
England, and was educating the nation; and this concep-
tion bound all citizens together into mutual love of one
another and the whole. On this ground he made his
impassioned appeal to his countrymen to throw off their
vices and follies and to be worthy of their high vocation ;
would they not, he asked, be true to Him who had
wrought so gloriously among them? This is the note
56 Theology in the English Poets.

of many a passage in the Task, of the whole of his
Poem of Expostulation; and it is not a note of merely
lyric interest in England’s glory on the seas, like Thom-
son’s Rule Britannia, nor one of intellectual passion,
like the references to her noble periods of history in the
Bard—it is a note that thrills with emotion for England
as God’s nation, and having a work to do for Man.
We already breathe the air of the patriotic poetry of
Wordsworth.

Nor does this interest in man remain fixed in England.
God had children, bone of the Poet’s bone, and flesh of
his flesh in other lands. From the banks of the Ouse his
heart carried him to Greenland, to Italy, to France, to the
islands of the Pacific, to the shores of Africa and South
America. In these distant lands were his brothers, and
he transferred the inalienable rights of Man from the free
and civilized European to the slave and the savage; there
was no man, he thought, who ought not to feel himself
allied to all the race.

The noblest right of Man was liberty, and this in
Cowper’s thought was the gift of God to Man. Whoever
took it away did the most accursed of all sins. His poetical
theology saw God as the deliverer and avenger of the
oppressed. He traces the ruin of Spain to the wrath of
God for its crimes against its subject races. He places
the cause of the slave in the hands of God.

In Cowper the poetry of human wrong begins, that
long, long cry against oppression and evil done by man
to man, against the political, moral, or priestly tyrant,
which rings louder and louder through Burns, Coleridge,
Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron, ever impassioned, ever
Lu Cowper. 57

longing, ever prophetic,—-never, in the darkest time,
quite despairing.

The wide range given to it by Cowper, the personal
passion in it, the glance it took forward to a brighter
time, its theological element of God as the source
of freedom and the avenger of tyranny, are all elements
distinctly new to our poetry, above all new in their
tremendous power of awakening and maintaining the
humane emotions which must create a human poetry.
Cowper carried this poetry of human wrong into the
prisons with Howard, and into the cottages and lives of the
poor ; he denounced the landowners who abandoned them,
and the merchants who “built factories with blood.”
Passing on, inspired by this cause, he poured out his
indignation and his scorn on kings and nobles who used
the common-weal for their own purposes. ‘ Patience
itself,” he cries, ‘‘is meanness in a slave.” That there
should be men base enough to bear the caprice of despots,
and to have freedom only on sufferance was the very folly
of infamy in his mind. Then he turns to sketch the
English King, and his sketch makes the preceding still

more forcible.

We love
The King who loves the law, respects his bounds,
And reigns content within them: him we serve
Freely and with delight, who leaves us free :
But recollecting still that he is man,
We trust him not too far. King though he be,
And King in England too, he may be weak
And vain enough to be ambitious still,
May exercise amiss his proper powers,
Or covet more than freemen choose to grant :
Beyond that mark is treason.

We may hear in all this nothing more than the old Whig
58 Theology in the English Poets.

doctrines in which the Cowpers had been brought up ;
but there is a newer element in it which insensibly entered
into Cowper, the cry of the coming revolution. We feel
that plainly when he suddenly places us in front of the
Bastile,—

Ye horrid towers, the abode of broken hearts,

Ye dungeons and ye caverns of despair,

That monarchs have supplied from age to age

With music such as suits their sovereign ears,

The sighs and groans of miserable men !

There’s not an English heart that would not leap
To hear that ye were fallen at last.

And high an English heart did leap, when a few years
afterwards Wordsworth heard that they were fallen, and
recorded his triumphant joy by the voice of the Solitary
in the Excursion. Nor is it less new in English poetry
to find a Poet putting aside blind patriotism and
rejoicing

to know

That even our enemies, so oft employed
In forging chains for us, themselves were free.

For he who loves freedom does not limit his zeal for it to
his own country—its cause, he says, is the cause of Man,
for it is the cause of God.

But here Cowper could not stop. He saw a higher
liberty than any on earth, a liberty without which political
liberty was in vain, with which even the slave felt free,
the liberty of heart derived from Heaven :

Bought with His blood who gave it to mankind,

The whole passage is a noble one, and as emotional as
that which precedes it: in both together, the passion of
Ln Cowper, 59

religion and the passion of political freedom are fused
into one, and they run up into the highest expression
then given in the English language of the poetry of
human liberty. It had been touched before: Glover, in his
‘Leonidas ; ” Akenside, in a now forgotten poem; Burke,
in prose which we may almost call poetic, and which itself
went forth to influence the poets ; Darwin, in “‘ The Botanic
Garden,” had condemned slavery on the ground more or
less of the unity of Man; but by none was so bold, so
impassioned, so complete an expression given of the rights
of Man as Man as by the retired lawyer’s-clerk at Olney.
He struck the first note of the revolutionary poetry. He
struck itin connection with God, and with us it has never
lost that connection.

But even further Cowper carried the poetry of Man.
International Union rose before him like a dream; he
thought of a higher earth in which wars and hatreds
should cease and each nation enjoy the other’s good. It
was a dream, partly caused by the results of the peace-
ful and commercial administration of Walpole, but it
was like many other dreams, in the air. Cowper
grounded it on the natural bond of brotherhood among
men, a bond which their common fellowship in sorrow
ought to draw closer. Social intercourse, “ benevolence
and peace and mutual aid,” commerce and art were
designed, he thought, ‘To associate all the branches of
mankind.”

Nor did Cowper forget the work of the natural philoso-
pher, and though driven by his notion of the evil of pride
of intellect he set philosophy too much in opposition to
religion, yet even here his predominant idea of the union
60 Theology in the Enghsh Poets.

of all men into one mankind comes in to unite the work
of science with that of art and commerce. ‘He too,”
speaking of the natural philosopher,
has a connecting power, and draws

Man to the centre of the common cause,
All these passages of which I speak were written in 1782,
and no one can deny the novelty of their idea in English
poetry nor the great expansion which that idea gave to
its subjects. For, treated from Cowper’s point of view,
from the emotional conception of Man as a great whole,
this thought of an international union, and of its means,
free trade and the rest, becomes a subject capable of
poetical treatment, and itremains such to the present day,
Wordsworth took it up, Shelley idealized it in his aérial
sketches of a world of Love; and Tennyson in well-known
lines embodies the same idea.

Then comes to close this long poetry of Man, Cowper’s
vision of the restoration of all things, in which he brings
for the last time God into Man, not now as the Judge,
but as the Redeemer of the Race, “to visit earth in
mercy, to descend, propitious in his chariot paved with
love.” All climes are made beautiful in an eternal spring,
‘all creatures worship man, and all mankind one Lord,
one Father.” Error has no place, nor evil; “all is
harmony and love; for heavenward all things tend ;”’ and
all nations bound together have their centre in Sion where
God reigns.

It was a vision which now for the first time came into
English Poetry. Here and there it may be found before
this time, but it was limited by the want of a universal
idea of Man. But, now, when the great conception
In Cowper. 61

of mankind as One, one in rights and powers and
destiny—of mankind as one universal Brotherhood, was
to be proclaimed in the political and social realms,
and to bring with it the slow overthrow of all exclu-
sive systems of society—the idea of a universal re-
generation of the race became for the first time possible.
In Cowper’s mind it was limited by his exclusive theology,
but that does not appear in this poetical passage where he
rises on the wings of emotion above his theology. In the
after poets it’ becomes a noble element in their song. For
whenever it arose, the Poet, filled with faith and hope in
the fortunes of mankind, rushed into noble verse. We
see how it told upon our poetry and told religiously, in
the finest expression of it, in the Prometheus Unbound of
Shelley: but the note here struck by Cowper in connection
with the idea of a universal mankind has never ceased to
echo in our poetry.

I turn, in conclusion, to that personal element in
Cowper’s poetry, in which theology plays so sad a part.
But first let me say two things. In connection with
the poetry of Man as seen from the personal point
of view, no English Poet has ever excelled Cowper when
he writes of the daily human affections. In him, onc
might almost say, began in English poetry that dircct,
close, impassioned representation, in the least sensa-
tional manner, of such common relations as motherhood,
filial piety, friendship, married love, the relation of man
to animals—and in him they are made religious.
There is nothing more pathetic yet more simple in Eng-
lish poctry than the lines on his mother’s picture, or the
sonnet and lines addressed to Mary Unwin. In the
62 Theology in the English Poets.

lines on the picture and in the sonnet, the natural piety
of the relations of a son to a mother, and of a friend
to a friend, are bound up with religion ; and the infinite
pitifulness of both are somewhat relieved by hope in God.
In the later lines to Mrs. Unwin, when she was nearly as
insane as he, there is no religion. It is ‘‘ passionless
despair, but the despair which loves to the last.”

The second thing I remark leads me to the personal
poetry of Cowper in its theological aspect. Much of it
is a terrible record, stained with insanity, wretched with
horror and despair. It has also, as we have seen, its
gentler, sweeter, nobler aspect when he was happy with
God; but even here it is often morbid with overwrought
fecling. But we must not think that this personal
misery or the morbid element in his religion extended
over his whole moral life, so as to make him or his
poetry unmanly. He was partly saved from that by
his humour—bumour which is the guard of intellectual
and moral sanity. But however saved, Cowper’s treat-
ment of all moral subjects is distinguished from his
treatment of his personal religion by an essential man-
liness of tone. Nowhere in our poetry is there heard a
finer scorn of vanity, ambition, meanness; nowhere is
truth more nobly exalted, or justice more sternly glori-
fied. And his tenderness for the weak and poor and
wronged is as sweet as his hatred of oppression is
strong. We breathe throughout an inviyorating air.

It is different when we return to his relation to God.
That is almost darkness throughout. His Calvinism,
which he seems to have had before meeting with Newton,
combined with the tendency to madness in him, had pro-
Ln Cowper. 63

duced a religious insanity, which, occurring at intervals
through his life, finally fixed its talons on his heart and
never let him go, even in the hour of death. He be-
lieved himself irrevocably doomed by God. We can
trace the first hints of it in some of his earlier poems.
At last an outward event hurried the evil to a head and
he attempted suicide. During the madness which fol-
lowed we have one poem written which is almost too
terrible to read, lit with a lurid light and full of
ghastly power.

Hatred and vengeance,—my eternal portion

Scarce can endure delay of execution, —

Wait with impatient readiness to seize my
Soul in a moment.

Damned below Judas; more abhorred than he was,

Who for afew pence sold his holy Master !

Twice-betrayed Jesus me, the last delinquent,
Deems the profanest.

Man disavows, and Deity disowns me,

Hell might afford my miseries a shelter ;

Therefore, Hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all
Bolted against me.

Hard lot! encompassed with a thousand dangers ;

Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors,

I'm called, if vanquished ! to receive a seutcnce
Worse than Abiram’s.

Him the vindictive rod of angry Justice

Sent quick and howling to the centre headlong ;

I, fed with judgmcnt, in a fleshly tomb, am
Buried above ground.

Whether his madness would have passed away under
the influence of a higher theology than that which
Newton presented to him, it is fruitless to inquire.
Again and again it settled down on his life in profound
gloom; it always threatened him, and days when he
64. Theology in the English Poets.

was happiest and best were often followed, even inter-
spersed, by hours of misery. It is a dreadful thing to
have the spirit mad and the intellect sound, and this was
not rarely the case of Cowper. Some of his finest work
was done when his soul trembled with the horror of
coming hell, and it is possible here and there, in the midst
of poems which breathe peace and simple gladness, to
catch far off the note of that terror and pity which gives
to the sequestered life of this lawyer’s clerk the intercst
and power of Tragedy. No pity is more touching than
that he bestows on suffering, none more childlike and
pathetic than that which he lavishes upon himself. He
speaks of his fate as if it belonged to another man,
caressing, as the case is with many of the insane, his own
misery with the gentlest words. I have quoted the
passage before, but in a different connection :—~

I was a stricken deer that left the herd

Long since ; with many an arrow deep infixed
My panting side was charged, when I withdrew
To seek a tranquil death in distant shades.
There was I found by one who had Himself
Been hurt by the archers. In His side He bore,
And in His hands and feet the cruel scars.

What an infinite, long-continued self-compassion in the
words! The note heard in them is low and sorrowful, and

_does not rise into passion; but the whole passage is exalted

not into, but towards the region of great poetry, partly by
its pictorial quality, but chiefly by the sudden yet natural
introduction of Christ coming through the woods to heal
him, and the association of his fate with that of the
Saviour. In the “ lines on receipt of my Mother’s picture,”
where he uses one of his favourite sea similes, the same
Ln Cowper. 65

self-pity takes to itself the clement of passion, but it

does not touch its deepest depth, for a shadow of hope
remains,

But me scarce hoping to attain that rest,

Always from port withheld, always distressed —
Me howling blasts drive devious, tempest tost,
Sails ripped, seams opening wide, and compass lost,
And day by day some current’s thwarting force
Sets me more distant from a prosperous course.

Yet oh! the thought that thou art safe —and he !
That thought is joy, arrive what may to me,

One sees that most of the intensity in that arises from the
conviction that there is an irreversible fate against him.
Continually, by hard striving, bringing himself near to
port, continually driven away by a superior power; con-
tending, weak as he was, with destiny till the last, yet
knowing the contest to be in vain; he has unconsciously put
himself into the position in which Greek Tragedy placed
its heroes, but in the midst of an unheroic time and
scenery, and with a heart not fitted to wage the battle of
(Edipus; so that, though the mental position is tragic, the
poetry wants the sublimity and the force of Tragedy.
Still there is profound passion in it, working especially in
the complete transference of himself into the soul of the
tormented ship, and in the splendid use of the word
“‘ devious ” in the third line. Unpretentious as the verses
are, the stamp of passion is far deeper set upon them than
in similar lines in Byron, where even his colossal power
could not overcome the unreality of his self-pity.

But it is in the last poem which Cowper wrote, in the
midst of the three last years of his madness and his life,

that this self-compassion does reach the centre of inten-
F
66 Theology in the English Poets.

sity. In the “ Castaway,” a poem in its sphere of the
very highest class, where simplicity of pitiful narration is
set in melodious verse by an Art which had now become
Nature--Cowper mingles up his fate with that of the
drowned sailor of Anson’s ship. He cannot help begin-
ning in the first person ; realizing the terrible night and
the swift ruin as his own. He makes himself the sailor :—

Obscurest night involved the sky,
The Atlantic billows roared,
When such a destined wretch as I,
Washed headlong from on board,
Of friends, of hope, of all bereft,
His floating home for ever left.

He changes then to description in the third person,
but we feel as we read of the long strugele of the
swimmer, ‘‘ supported by despair of life;” as he describes
the pitiless blast which forbade his friends to rescue him,
the useless succour of the cask and cord which served only
to prolong his agony, the bitter thought that they were
right to leave him—that we are looking into the heart of
Cowper’s life. With what exquisite simplicity of words,
and yet with what a grasp of misery, is the next verse
conceived—

He long survives, who lives an hour
In Ocean, self-upheld ;

And so long he, with unspent power,
His destiny repelled ;

And ever as the minutes flew
Entreated help, or cried Adieu.

We are now relieved by a change from the doom of the
sailor to the grief of Anson for his fate, and then, in a
sudden rushing of misery, in which the impassioned
In Cowper. 67

imagination rises almost into a wild cry, and the verse in

the last two lines becomes abrupt, and the voice choked,

he again dashes himself into the fate of the sailor, and
- both perish in the seas:—

No voice divine the storm allayed,
No light propitious shone,

When, suatclied frem all effectual aid,
We perished, each alone ;

But I beneath a rougher sea,

And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he,

The poetic life of Cowper lies between this poem at the
end, and those terrible Sapphics at the begining. He
entered it in despair, he left it in despair. For a time,
during which he wrote most of the Olney Hymns, he
enjoyed the sense of that “assurance” of salvation on
which his friend Newton dwelt so much, and the humble
ecstasy of some of the hymns is wonderfully touching.
But the lines which have found a place in every hymn
book—

“ God moves in a mysterious way,
His wonders to perform,” etc.

mark the close of this period and prophesy the relapse
which followed. When the attack was over, he never
recovered his sense of acceptance with God. He even
learned to acquiesce, at times, in God’s condemnation of
him to eternal misery. But the weight of this dreadful
belief did not always oppress him. It came and went like
dark clouds upon an April day of sunshine, and till the
last three years, his life had many intervals of happiness.

Many lovely landscapes lay between these three valleys of
F2
68 Theology in the English Poets.

the Shadow of Death, where he rested and was at peace ;
sweet idleness and fruitful contemplation—tender friend-
ships and simple pleasures—hours where charming humour
and simple pathos ran through one another, and inter-
changed their essence like the colours on a sun-set sea—
days of sweet fidelity to Nature in her quietest and most
restoring moods—times when the peace that passeth all
understanding made him as a child with God; but in the
end the darkness settled down, deep and impenetrable:
and the Poet, who of all English Artists, has written, to
my mind, the noblest hymns for depth of religious feeling
and for loveliness of quiet style; whose life was blameless
as the water-lilies which he loved, and the way of life of
which on silent streams he made his own; whose heart
breathed the sweetest air of natural piety, and yet could
sympathize with the supersensuous world in which
Guyon lived—died in ghastly hopelessness, refusing
comfort to the last. On the physician asking how he
felt, he answered, “I feel unutterable despair.” —
It is a strange commentary on the demand which the
school of his friend Newton make, that on the death-bed
there should be, or else one may scarcely dare to hope, a
triumphant confession of faith,
76-69 sobed Buissiiy

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Missing Page

Missing pages 69-92
dn Werdsworth, 93

LECTURE Y.
WORDSWORTH.

In speaking of the poetry of Nature, we have at length
arrived at Wordsworth, and in coming to him, we come to
the greatest of the English Poets of this century; greatest
not only as a Poet, but asa philosopher. It is the ming-
ling of profound thought, and of ordered thought, with
poetic sensibility and power (the power always the master
of the sensibility), which places him in this high position.
He does possess a philosophy, and its range is wide as the
universe. He sings of God, of Man, of Nature, and, as
the result of these three, of Human Life, and they are
all linked by thought, and through feeling, one to another ;
so that the result is a complete whole which one can
study as if it were a world of its own. As such, the
whole of his poetry is full, not of systematic theology, but
of his own theology; and to bring this out, while at the
same time analysing his work as a Poet, is the object of
the lectures I shall deliver upon him. My first subject will
he the mode in which he conceives God in His relation to
Nature, and necessarily what he means by Nature; the
next will be the relation which Nature bears to Man, and
the work of God on Man through that relation. After-
wards I shall speak fully of Wordsworth’s poetry of Man
94 Theology in the English Poets.

and its theology. It may seem too much to those who
know Wordsworth but little, to devote so many lectures
to him alone, but the only feeling that one who loves
this Poet can have is, that too much time can scarcely
be spent upon him; and that if only a few are induced
not to glance over but to study his work, more good may
be done than by a hundred sermons. For in truth his
poetry is, as Coleridge said of the “ Prelude,”

an Orphic song indeed,
A song divine of high and passionate thoughts
To their own music chanted.

ometimes, the Nature of Man, those inherent and inde-
tructible qualities which are common to the whole race,
and which form together that which we call Human
Nature. In the realm of the imagination Wordsworth
frequently conceives of this Human Nature as one person,
acting as if directly from himself; the male being of the
universe to whom Nature, that is, the spirit who informs
the outward world, is as the female being of the uni-
verse wedded in love and holy marriage.

But the term he more commonly uses when speaking of
Human Nature is the Mind of Man. Yor all the practical
purposes of my lectures I may take the meaning of the
term Nature to be concerned in Wordsworth’s Poetry
with the world outside of us. In most of the previous.
poets as in ordinary talk, it means the outward universe
with its motions and laws, all that we know and feel
beyond ourselves, organic and inorganic; and in this
sense Wordsworth sometimes uses it. But that would

: The term Nature, in Wordsworth’s use of it, means,
8
Ln Wordsworth, 95

not define his use of the term accurately, for then Nature
might be conceived of as dead, or as the image of our
own thought. Wordsworth added Life to the outward
world, and separated it from our thought.

I traced in a previous lecture the growth of the concep-
tion of Nature as alive, and said that this conception
which had only been in germ in others, reached its
full growth in Wordsworth’s poetry. In what way?
The outward universe lay before the Poet’s eye and ear.
He felt it speak to him, through his senses to his
soul, and feeling this, he asked, What is it? Who is
it that speaks? Is it only the matter of the universe,
which by itself is dead? No, he answered; Matter is
animated by a soul, and it is this soul which thrills to
meet me. ‘An active principle” subsists

In all things, in all natures, in the stars

Of azure heaven, the unenduring clouds,

In flower aud tree, in every pebbly stouc
That paves the brooks; the stationary rocks,

The moving waters and the invisible air,
* * a *

from link to link
It circulates, the soul of all the worlds,

Now that which acts, lives; and the universe lives as much
by its soul as we do by ours.

To this active principle, Wordsworth gave personality ;'
that which all shared in was in fact one. It was one life,
one will, one character, one person. And this personality
he called Nature.

} To Wordsworth as he wrote, she took a living form, and’
became the life-giving spirit of the world. Day by day she
built up the universe; it was she who, from her own vast
96 Theology in the English Poets.

life, gave to everything its special life, a separate soul to
each:

Yet whate’er enjoyments dwell,

In the impenetrable cell

Of the silent heart, which Nature

Furnishes to every creature.
Each had from Nature not only its own distinct soul, and
character, but also its own distinct work to do; the ele-
ments had their business, “ the stars have tasks, the silent
heavens their goings on.”’

And not only had each separate thing the gift of a soul
from Nature, but whenever a place, such as a lonely dell
among the hills, had a special beauty and character of its
own, it was it by reason of a special soul within it, of a
more manifold soul than that which dwelt in a single
flower or stone.*

The thought was still further varied; and the larger
divisions of the world of Nature, the whole of the sky, the
whole of the earth and of the sea, were gifted with distinct
and more complex being :

The gentleness of Heaven is on the sea:
Listen! the mighty Being is awake

. Aud doth with his eternal motion make
A sound like thunder everlastingly.

nee further still, the moving powers of Nature, the wind,
when it dan:es over wood and hill, tossing trees and grass,
bearing on its bosom the seeds of earth, becomes the
“over-soul” of the things it touches, adds to them a
new pleasure and a new life, a life of reckless sport and
jollity.
* « A spirit and pulse of good,

A life and soul to every mode of being
Inseparably linked.”
In Wordsworth. 9%

Describing the dandelion seed, or the thistle beard in
their game upon the lake, Wordsworth writes—

Suddenly halting now, a lifeless stand !

And starting off again with freak as sudden
In all its sportive wanderings, all the while
Making report of an invisible breeze,

That was its wiugs, its chariot, and ifs horse,
Its very playmate and its moving soul.

Nor is this all; Nature has her own personal pleasures,
emotions, thoughts, plans such as we might have. She
chooses places, as we might do, for her special delight in
the universe which is her kingdom, quiet places such as
that ‘glade of water,” and one green field hidden far
among the trees, of which the Poet says—

The spot was made by Nature for herself,

giving vivid personality by this touch of selectiveness to
the being he has created. She exercises watchful care
over the life of all things; she loves, with passion pure
and calm, all her children.

And her love passes from her own works to Man. She
pours herself into the Poets, whom she chooses for he
special friends, and through whom she speaks to Man
and Wordsworth felt that he was chosen by her from hi
hirth. Others there were whose souls, though unable to
express themselves, were yet a favoured haunt of hers.
Such was his brother, who had early gona to sea:

Nature there
Was with thce: she who loved us both, she still
Was with thee ; and even so didst thou become
A silent Poct; from the solitude
Of the vast sea didst bring a watchful heart
Still couchant, an inevitable ear,
And an eye practised like a blind man’s touch,
98 Theology in the English Poets.

There were others also, whom she chose not as persons to
express her, but as children on whom she could lavish all
her love without asking from them a return. And no
lovelier poem exists than that in which. Nature makes
her whole world unite to educate and make beautiful one
little maiden :

Three years she grew in sun and shower
Then Nature said—‘‘A lovelier fower
On earth was uever sown:

This Child I to myself will take,

She shall be mine, and I will make

A Lady of my own.

Myself will to my darling be

Both law and impulse: and with me
The Girl, in rock and plain,

In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,
Shall feel an over-seeing power

To kindle and restrain.”

There is no need to quote the rest, it is well-known; but
nothing can be more living than the personality with which
this poem invests Nature, nothing greater than the differ-
ence in feeling and thought between this conception and
the mechanical Nature of Pope, or the dead universe of
Cowper. We are in contact with a Person, not with a
thought. But who is this person? Is she only the crea-
tion of imagination, having no substantive reality beyond
the mind of Wordsworth? No, she is the poetic imper-
sonation of un actual Being, the form which the Poet
gives to the living Spirit of God in the outward world,
in order that he may possess a metaphysical thought as a
subject for his work as an artist. We know that this
theological idea is at the basis of Wordsworth’s repre-
sentation of Nature from many passages. Here is onc:
Ln Wordsworth, 99

Wisdom and spirit of the Universe :

Thou Soul that art the Eternity of thonght !
And giv’st to forms and images a breath

And everlasting motion; not in vain,

By day or starlight, thus from my first dawn
Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me
The passions which build up our human ‘goul

This. is Gad, livingpmovine,-end-rejoicine in vinlin works
not-.God. in Mens-but-God: in: Natttiey a -whetly distined§

manifestatton of His life. “Again, he speaks o

The Being that is iu the clouds and air,
That is in the green leaves among the groves.

And to this Being he allots the care also of the creatures
whom He loves. Moreover, His

Dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean, and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

Tt is more, you observe, than a mere influence; it is a
conscious life which realizes itself as a personality, in
realizing itself within the sum of things. In fact, this
Being who is the life of the universe, is the all-moving
Spirit of God, the soul which is the eternity of Thought
in Nature.* It may be the fashion to call this pantheistic,

* A few lines in the “‘ Prelude” express this clearly :
Hitherto,

In progress through this Verse, my mind hath looked
Upon the speakivg face of earth and heaven
As her prime teacher, intercourse with man
Established by the Sovercigu Intellect,
Who through that bodily image hath diffused,
As might appear to the eye of fleeting time,

A deathless spirit, Bk. v.
2
100 Theology in the English Poets.

but it is the true and necessary pantheism which affirms
God in all, and all by Him, but which does not affirm
that the All includes the whole of God. It is true a
certain amount of what is called the personality of God
seems to slip away from Wordsworth, when he speaks of
God being in Nature; but we must separate, in speaking
of his theology, his idea of God in relation to man which
he conceived of as distinctly a personal relation, from his
idea of God in relation to Nature which he could not
conceive of ag an absolutely personal relation. In the
case of man, God entering into what we call personality
is thought of as personal—in the case of Nature, God
entering into that which is impersonal is thought of as
impersonal; or rather we are forced by our ignorance to
use terms which imply impersonality, such as a motion, a
Presence, and others.
Nevertheless Wordsworth’s feeling of personality—that
is of distinct self-consciousness of Being in God, was so
, strong, that he uses also such terms as the “ Being who is
\in the clouds and air,” and he would probably have said
ithat the personality of God in reference to Nature consisted
in God’s consciousness of Himself at every moment of
time in every part, as well as in the whole of the universe.
But as this is a metaphysical and not a poetic thought,
“andas Wordsworth wanted a thought which he could use
: poetically,* he transferred this idea of God realising ITis
personality in the whole of the universe, to an actual
person whom he creates, to a Being whom he terms
Nature.

* The closing lines of the sonuct written at sea off the Isle of Man
show how keeuly Wordsworth felt the necessity of conceiving of Nature
and of all her forms as living, if any intense poetry of Nature was to.be
Ln Wordsworth, IOI

And hence there grew up in his mind the thought of
one personal spiritual life, which had infinitely subdivided
itself through all the forms of the outward world, which
could realize an undivided life at any moment, but which
also lived a distinct life in every part. It became possible
then for him to have communication with any one mani-
festation of that life, in a tree or a rock or a cloud; to
separate in thought the characteristics of any one form of
it from another—or omitting the consideration of the
parts—to think of or communicate with the whole, to
realize the one spiritual life that conditioned itself in all, *
as a Person with whom he could speak and from whom he
could receive impulse or warning or affection.

And when this was done, when Nature seemed one Life,
then the necessary spirituality of the thought made him
lose consciousness of the material forms under which this
life appeared; and that condition of mind arose in which
Nature was unsubstantialized in thought. And we find
Wordsworth in many passages representing this as his
experience, nor is it at all an uncommon one. For
there are times when the sense of this spiritual life in
Nature becomes so dominant that the material world fades
away, and we feel as if we ourselves were pure spirit,

written, and how, as a Poet of Nature, he resented the mechanica
theory of the universe.

O Fancy, what an age was that for song!

“That age when not by laws inanimate,
Ag men believed, the waters were impelled,
The air controlled, the stars their courses held ;
But element and orb on acts did wait,
Of Powers endued with visible form, instinct
With will, and to their work by passion linked.
102 Theology in the English Poets.

and all the objects of sense were not real things we could
touch, but unsubstantial appearances. In certain physical
states—when they are accompanied with that upper medi-
tation, if I may so call it, in which one seems to float apart
from the body—the outward world is not felt, but only the
life which inspires it. We are furced to go to a tree to
touch it, in order to realise that it is tangible. We re-
ceive, that is, images through the senses, and the senses
give them to the imagination and the intellect to deal with.
These powers turn the sensible images into ideas and emo-
tions, and so vivid do these ideas and emotions become,
that they push the sensible things which awaked them out
of the field of our consciousness. Through the sense we
lose the sense, through the visible we enter the world of
the invisible. It is an experience many of us have gone
through. It comes chiefly when the incessant small noises
of Nature make less attack upon the ear, when we are
high up on a mountain side, or when we sit at night by
the sea when the low mist seems to hush the water into
silence, or when in deep noon one sound alone, like the
wandering voice of the cuckoo, smites on the ear. One
knows how Wordsworth felt this last—how the invisible
bird became to him only a voice, a mystery; till the whole
world was taken out of the region of sense and made as
visionary as this herald of the spring.
O blessed bird ! the earth we pace
Again appears to be

An unsubstantial faery place :
That is fit home for thee,

Tt is an experience which often came to this poet as boy
and man. It marked his youth, as he tells us in one of
Li Wordsworth. 103

0

his letters ; it marked his manhood, and then he knew
better what it meant: then he felt that when the earth
grew unsubstantial in this hour of ecstasy, it was to reveal
the spiritual substance which lay within it, the life of the
living God—the ineffable act and thought of God by
which the universe consisted. He speaks of times

when
The gross and visible frame of things
Relinquishes its hold upon the sense,
Yea, almost on the mind itsclf, and seems

All unsubstantialized. Exe nv ft 63°66

And the living soul communes directly with the living
soul of Nature, ‘ spirit to spirit, ghost to ghost.’

What is it then, to which we speak, with whom we have
communion? Not with Nature the poetic creation of the
imagination, but with the spirit of the God who abides
as Life in all. Here are some lines from the “ Excur-
sion” which express it, which embody the grandeur of
Wordsworth’s theology of Nature in words as grand as the
thought :

Such was the Boy—but for the growing Youth
What soul was his, when, from the naked top

Of some bold headland, he beheld the sun

Rise up, and bathe the world in light! He looked —
Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth

And ocean’s liquid mass, in gladness lay

Beneath him :—Far and wide the clouds were touched
And in their silent faces could be read

Unutterable love. Sound needed none,

Nor any voice of joy ; his spirit drank

The spectacle: sensation, soul, and form,

All melted into him: they swallowed up

His animal being ; in them did he live,

And by them did he live ; they were his Jife.
104 Theology in the English Poets,

In such access of mind, in such high hour

Of visitation from the living God,

Thought was not ; in enjoyment it expired.

No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request ;
Rapt into still communion that transcends

The imperfect offices of prayer and praise,

His mind was a thanksgiving to the power

That made him; it was blessedness and love!

J have now to ask, what are the special characteristics
of this life of Nature, and how are they connected with
the thought of a divine life ?

The first characteristic of this life of Nature is, that it
is a life of enjoyment. No instance of Wordsworth’s
belief in this is finer than the first poem upon the
naming of places. I give it as one example, though the
thought runs through the whole of Wordsworth :

It was an April morning: fresh and clear
The Rivulet, delighting in its strength,

Ran with a young man’s speed ; and yet the voice
Of waters which the winter had supplied
Was softened down into a vernal tone.

The spirit of enjoyment and desire,

And hopes and wishes, from all living things
Went circling, like a multitude of sounds.
The budding groves seemed eager to urge on
The steps of June: as if their various hues
Were only hindrances that stood between
Them and their object: but, meanwhile, prevailed
Such an entire contentment in the air

That every naked ash, and tardy tree

Yet leafless, showed as if the countenance
With which it looked on this delightful day
Were native to the summer.—Up the brook
T roamed in the confusion of my heart,

Alive to all things and forgetting all.

At length I to a sudden turning came

In this continuous glen, where down a rock
The Stream, so ardent in its course before,
Ln Wordsworth. 105

Sent forth such sallies of glad sound that all

Which I till then had heard appeared the: voice

Of common pleasure : beast and bird, the lamb,

The shepherd’s dog, the linnet and the thrush

Vied with this waterfall, aud made a song

Which, while I listened, seemed like the wild growth
Or like some natural produce of the air,

That could not cease to be, |

Naturally, the same idea of frank enjoyment of life is
given to things which have organic life. The hare runs
races in her mirth, the flowers enjoy the air they breathe.
The waves dance beside the daffodils, but they

Outdid the sparkling waves in glee,
A Poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company.

The bluecap in the appletree cannot contain himself
for glee, nor the lambs, in spring. Thus, he says of the
linnet ;

Thou, ranging up and down the bowers,

Art sole in thy employment ;

A Life, a Presence like the Air,

Scattering thy gladness without care,

Too blest with any one to pair ;

Thyself thy own enjoyment.
And though, when autumn had come, these gave no sign
of open joy, yet it did not follow that they had no

enjoyment, for other pleasures might be
Sweeter e’en than gaiety,

And all this life was praise to God, natural, unconscious
praise, praise because the givers could not help giving it;
their enjoyment their greatest praise, as ours should be ;
full and deep as that with which each morning the lark
sang its hymn to God.
106 Theology in the English Poets.

Happy, happy Liver !
With a soul as strong as a mountain river,
Pouring out praise to the Almighty Giver.

That was the religious aspect of this delight in life. But it
passed from the religious to the theological when this
infinite pleasure of the whole of Nature was felt to be
by Wordsworth, not only symbolic of, but actually, the
joy of God in His own life. It was God who renewed
each moment in the boundless delight of all things, his
‘“‘ ancient rapture’ in the continuous act of creation; it
was God Himself who rejoiced in the brook and the tree,
in the daisy and the lark. Itis a thought which should
add anew element to our happiness. For in our worst
sadness we ought not to be too morose to be glad of the
pleasure of all things—in our worst grief the sense of
God’s enjoyment which we receive from the joy of Nature
ought to come with healing to our hearts.

The second characteristic of the life of Nature is its
quietude. She has joy, ecstasy in her life, but it is
untroubled ecstasy. We are ‘pressed by heavy laws,”
tormented by doubt, and rent by struggle against condi-
tions which we will not obey at once. Nature’s life is at
peace, for her children never wage a foolish strife with
her; nor does self enter their hearts to make them
weary of life. Deep calm is at her heart, the moun-
tains rest in their own peace, the stars shine quietly,
the sun “sinks down in his tranquillity,’ the flowers
keep a still silence, and though there are storms which
drive the clouds in passionate course, and torrents which
rend the earth, and strong forces which sweep to and
fro the elements in bewildering and endless, motion, yet
In Wordsworth. 107

in the higher region of thought in which these things are
seen in their relation to the great whole, there is

Central peace subsisting at the heart
Of endless agitation.

And this, too—this tranquil being in each thing which
sends “its own deep quiet to restore our hearts,” this
central peace, was not’ self-born in Nature—it was in
Wordsworth’s thought the ineffable calm of God's exist-
ence which spoke to us and redeemed us.

The third characteristic is ceaseless intercommunion,
and that was founded on the unutterable love which flowed
through all things, and with which each thing acted on
each other. The whole world was linked together. Every
part, every element, gave and received, honoured and did
service to each other. Hach plant and hill, cloud and
stream, has its own life and character, and they delight
in social intercourse like friends who love each other—
there is no jar, no jealousy, no envy there—their best joy
is in being kind to one another.

This idea ig the loveliest of all which Wordsworth
introduced into English poetry, and it flowed from his
conception of everything in Nature having its own pecu-
liar life. I might give a hundred instances of it, for it
runs like a living stream through all the woodland of
his poetry. It is varied in many ways; the waves are
brothers which run after one another; he says of the great
eminence which of all his hills last parleyed with the
setting sun that the meteors made of it their favourite
haunt, as if even those wild bodies had their power of
choice to love one cliff especially; the lake rejoices to
1038 Theology in the English Poets.

receive into her bosom the scenery which surrounds

her :
Through all her depths St. Mary's lake
Is visibly delighted,
For not a feature of the hills
Is in her mirror slighted.

And Windermere prepares herself, like a woman for one
she loves, to receive the evening:

The lake though bright is of a placid blue
As if preparing for the peace of evening.

In spring time the whole world gives and receives joy;
and earth and sky and man feel their communion each
with each:

There is a blessing in the air,

Which seems a sense of joy to yield

To the bare trees, and mountains bare,

And grass in the green field.
* “ * a

Love, now an universal birth,

From heart to heart is stealing,

From earth to man, from man to earth—
It is the hour of feeling.

But the noblest passage out of many is in the “ Excur-
sion” where the Solitary speaks of the two great brother
peaks which overpeered the glen. I read it: mark how
the wind rejoices in them, and they give back its wild
pleasure; how all the things which touch and haunt them
get their reply ; how they are loved and love; how busy
are the mute agents there; how proud the stars to shine
on them:
‘« Thove lusty twins,” exclaimed our host, ‘if here

It were your lot to dwell, would soon become
Your prized companions.—Many are the notes
In Wordsworth. 109

Which, in his tuneful course, the wind draws forth
From rocks, woods, caverns, heaths, and dashing shores 5
And well those lofty brethren bear their part

In the wild concert—chiefly when the storm
Rides high ; then all the upper air they fill

With roaring sound, that ceases not to flow,

Like smoke, along the level of the blast,

In mighty current ; theirs, too, is the song

Of stream and headlong flood that seldom fails ;
And, in the grim and breathless hour of noon,
Methinks that I have heard them echo back

The thunder’s greeting. Nor have Nature’s laws
Left them ungifted with a power to yield

Music of finer tone ; a harmony.

So do I call it, though it be the hand

Of silence, though there be no voice ;—the clouds,
The mist, the shadows, light of golden suns,
Motions of mooulight, all come thither—touch,
And have au answer—thither come, and shape

A language not unwelcome to sick hearts

And idle spirits :—there the sun himself,

At the calm close of summer’s longest day,

Rests his substantial orb ;—between those heights
And on the top of either pinnacle,

More keenly than elsewhere in night’s blue vault,
Sparkle the stars, as of their station proud,
Thoughts are not busier in the mind of man

Than the mute agents stirring there :—alone

Here do I sit and watch.” Ex aes, ti

The deep underlying thought of all this belief in the
love and intercommunion of all things—the thought which
makes Nature, in this conception of her, divine—was that
this endless interchange of life and joy was in reality, not
the type of, but actually, the never-ceasing self-reciproca-
tion of God. He divides Himself into a myriad forms,
and lives in each distinctly, and makes His own ineffable
society and enjoyment by living with Himself from form
to form, by loving Himself, and by self-communion
110 Theology in the English Poets.

through infinitely varied activity and beauty and sacrifice,
giving and receiving Himself for ever in the universe. And
yet, though I say self in these sentences, it is because we
inust so express it, in order to get the idea. There is no
Self in our sense of the word in God, none except the
consciousness of perfect Being: and we can best express
what that consciousness of Being is by saying that it is
for ever the unspeakable delight of everlasting thought
unremittingly passing into creative activity, in which that
which we call self is so lost as never to be known.

This is the idea of Life in Nature, which Wordsworth
has given to the world. It fills the heart of his readers;
it makes of Nature a new thing to them; if makes
the commonest walk in the woods a delight, a teaching, a
society; it fills the world with life and energy and joy; it
uplifts us sometimes when alone among the hills—when
Nature is in one of her wild moods, and her life most
intelligent and most cager, into a kindred ecstasy in which
we long to be borne away with wind and cloud to join the
mighty stream of rejoicing Life. So was it once at least
with Wordsworth : and with this I close.

Oh! what a joy it were, in vigorous health,
To have a body (this our vital frame
With shrinking sensibility endued,
And all the nice regards of flesh and blood)
And to the clements surreuder it
As if it were a spirit !—How divine,
The liberty, for frail, for mortal man,
Yo roan at large among unpeopled elens
And mountainous retiremcuts, only trod
By devious footsteps ; regions conscerate
Yo oldest time ! and, reckless of the sterm
That Eccps the raven quiet in her nest,
Be as a presence or a motion—oue.
ln Wordsworth, II

Among the many there ; and while the mists
Flying, and rainy vapours, call out shapes
And phantoms from the crags and solid earth
As fast as a musician scatters sounds

Out of an instrument; and while the streams
(As at a first creation and in haste

To exercise their untried faculties)
Descending from the region of the clouds,
And starting from the hollows of the earth
More multitudinous every moment, rend
Their way before them—what a joy to roam
An equal among mightiest energies ;

And haply sometimes with articulate voice,
Amid the deafening tumult, scarcely heard
By him that utters it, exclaim aloud,

‘* Rage on ye elements ! let moon and stars
Their aspects lend, and mingle in their turn
With this commotion (ruinous though it be)
From day to night, from night to day, prolonged !”
112 Theology in the Engtesh Poets.

LECTURE VI.

—_+—.

In my last lecture I spoke of the meaning Wordsworth
nad for the term ‘ Nature,” of his conception of Nature
as having a life of her own and of the characteristics of
that life, its endless joy, central peace, and how all its
forms, each having their own life, were knit together by
unselfish love. But these*are terms which are true of
humanity also; we can say that human nature is capable
of joy and peace and love, and Wordsworth does say that
we see in Nature similar passions to our own. But
though he thought them similar, be did not think them
identical; he drew a clear distinction between them,
between the life in Nature and that in Man. On this
distinction I must now cularge, in order that I may come
to that part of my subject which treats of the education
that Nature gives to man; a thought that pervades the
whole of Wordsworth’s poetry.

There are poets who impute to Nature their own moods
and feelings, as when Tennyson makes the larkspur listen
for Maud’s footstep, or when Coleridge, giving to natural
things the power of man, makes the Wind an actor or a
“poet. This is what Ruskin calls the ‘“ pathetic fallacy; ”
and a few instances, such as the phrase “forlorn cascades,”
In Wordsworth, 113

where the lonely water-fall seems to him abandoned by
the world because he feels himself forlorn, exist in Words-
worth; but he always means to distinguish clearly between
his own feelings and those which he believes belong to
things outside himself. The Me and the not-Me are not
the same. It is not the poet who makes Nature this or
that by giving himself to her; it is she who builds up
part of his bemg by communicating herself to him. It is
not that the sea is in this or that special mood, because
he is in it, or that the birds sing of certain things of
which he is thinking, but that the sea has its own moods, °
and that the birds sing their own emotions:

The birds around me hopped and played

Their thoughts I cannot measure : £ Sevne rh goth

He does not define their thoughts: he is only certain
that they do think, and have pleasure and pain of their

own;
But the least motion that they made

Tt secmed a thrill of pleasure. = J. *

Tt is the same thing with flowers and rocks and clouds ;
he could not express their kind of existence, but he was
certain of its being a feeling existence :_

And ’tis my faith that every flower Brocs M

Enjoys the air it breathes.

He is, of course, obliged to use the same terms as we
use about our thinking and feeling, when he speaks of
the life which natural things live, but he does not identify
their thoughts and feelings with ours. They are similar
to ours but they differ from ours, being conditioned by the
different material through which they work, in a oe
114 Theology in the English Poets.

greater degree, though in the same way as the thoughts
and feelings of a man differ from those of a woman.

It is important in reading Wordsworth to understand
this clearly—this separate life of Nature and Man, this
distinctness which enables a dramatic action to take
place between them. We have wholly got rid of the
thought of Coleridge that Nature lives by the projection
of our self upon it: we do not receive what we give,
we give and receive back something wholly different. It
is not the reflection of ourselves which we have from
Nature, it is the friendship of another than ourselves.

It is this which makes Wordsworth’s poetry so fresh,
so healthy, and of such a morning quality. He forgets
himself in the beauty, joy, and life of things; he will not
spoil Nature by tracing in her any likeness to his own
moods; he would not willingly have written that stanza
in In Memoriam,” beginning with these lines :

Calm is the morn without a sound,

Calm as to suit a calmer grief:—
they would have contradicted his philosophy—nor traced in
the gathering storm and looming cloud the “wild despair”
of grief which filled Tennyson’s heart for the loss of his
friend. Nor would he, even by permitting human as-
sociations to cluster thickly in certain places, prevent
these places from making their own natural impres-
sion upon him—a thing which Tennyson does frequently.
The whole of the descriptions of Nature in “In Me-
moriam” are tinged with one or the other of these
faults: skies, flowers, clouds, and trees, are full of the
self of the poet, or of recollections of his friend; and
the result is that a partly morbid impression is left on the
Ln Wordsworth. 115

- Feader, even in the triumphant passages at the end—~an
impression of the tyranny of Human Nature over Nature,
of ourselves as being the only thing in the universe—
which is a depressing element in the pocm. It is painful
to be deprived by this imposition of Man on Nature of
the only chance we have of getting rid of ourselves, or
of feeling another life than human life. It is the first
excellence of Wordsworth that though he does not pass
by this “ pathetic fallacy” altogether, he only treats it:as
a transient and unhealthy phase.

The Poem on the picture of Peele Castle in a storm
has been so explained as to be an example of this
pathetic fallacy, but Wordsworth is true in it to his
philosophy.

He sees in it the Sea at peace, but he does not see it as
the image of his own peace. It has its own quiet from
its own nature, not from his. Being thus distinct, it
sends its impression of calm to influence his heart. That
being received, the powers of his mind take it up, and add
their own work to it, “the consecration and the Poet’s
dream.” From both these things—from the impression
passively received, and the active energy of thought upon
it—another thing arises, the poetic picture, the work
of Art.

Ab! then, if mine had been the Painter's hand,
To express what then I saw ; and add the gleam,

The light that never was, on sea or land,
The consecration, and the Poet’s dream ;

I would have planted thee, thou hoary Pile,
Amid a world how different from this!

Beside a sea that could not cease to smile ;
On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss.
116 Theology tn the English Poets.

Thou sbouldst have seemed a treasure-house divine
Of peaceful years ; a chronicle of heaven;

Of all the sunbeams that did ever shine
The very sweetest had to thee been given.

A Picture had it been of lasting ease,
Elysian quiet, without toil or strife ;
No motion but the moving tide, a breeze,

Or merely silent Nature's breathing life.

Such, in the fond illusion of my heart,

Such Picture would I at that time have made
And seen the soul of truth in every part,

A steadfast peace that might not be betrayed.

Tt is an illustration, in a small way, of what he means in
the lines soon to be quoted, when he says that the indivi-
dual mind and the external universe are fitted, in differ-
ence, to each other, and when wedded together accomplish
a creation—something different from both—with blended
might.

The latter part of the Poem is another side of the same
thought, only the Art work which he wished to do for the
calm, is done by Beaumont for the storm. THe can no
loneer look on a calm sea and find the impression of calm.
Something has happened which forbids it; the sea has
engulphed his brother. Buthe neither imposes the storm
jn his own heart on the calm, nor sees the sea in the storm
as in sorrow for his loss. The sea has zits own anger and
fury. But Beaumont has seen it in storm, and receiving
from it an impression of anger, has added to that impres-
sion, by imagination, correlative human emotion, and
composed both into one creation by Art. And on this
creation Wordsworth loves to look. It, the human work,
the artistic result of the blended might of Nature and
In Wordsworth. 1r4

of the human mind, consoles him by its sympathy
with his sorrow. The conclusion follows easily from this
analysis.

Nothing can be more remote than all this from the
faded sentiment which we found in Warton and the other
poets of his class. To sit in the shade of yew trees, and
feel a charm in their gloom reflecting our own—as was
the case with the youth on whom Wordsworth wrote
his “ Lines near Esthwaite ”»—to trace in the barren
landscape an emblem of our own unfruitful life, is the
most sickly of all pleasures :

The man whose eye
Is ever on himself, doth look on one
The least of Nature’s works, one who might move
The wise man to that scorn which wisdom holds
Unlawful, ever.

And he went further still: not only were we bound ta
resist this tendency, but Nature herself had against it a
sad resentment. Against it she continually fought, her
one effort being to redeem us from this self-consideration,
to lead us to lose our stormy passions in her quiet, our
consuming sadness in her joy. An instance of this in his
own experience occurs in the Ode on the intimations of
Immortality. He begins by feeling that a glory has
passed from the earth since he was young: gricf falls on
him, and in the shade of disenchantment the splendour
leaves the grass, and the freshness the sunlight. But with
the very utterance of the thought he springs away from
this diseased condition. Nature speaking to him, he “,
hears her voice; and joy returns, not the joy of early life,
but a stiller, more grave delight. “No more shall grief
118 Theology in the English Poets.

of mine the season wrong,” he cries; it would indeed be
an evil day if he were sullen,

While the earth is herself adorning
This sweet May morning.

There shall be no severing of his love from fountains,
meadows, hills, and groves :

Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might ;
I only have relinquished one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway ;
I love the brooks which down their channels fret
Even more than when I tripp’d lightly as they ;
The innocent brightness of a new-born day

Is lovely yet ;

The lines have their own special. connection, but through
them also runs the thought of which we speak—of the
distinctness of the being of Nature from the being of
Human Nature, and of the work which Nature, as dis-
tinct, does on Man. His own mood of morbid melan-
choly which he tried to lay on Nature, she had refused to
receive; she sent him back, on the contrary, her mood
of joy. When he had opened his heart to that influence,
though the melancholy did not wholly depart, it was freed
from weakness and selfishness. His heart was opened,
his sadness was filled with strength and the hope which
comes of delight in other things than our own emotions.
All this may not be theological, but it is distinctly
religious. It is the very element in which a high religion
becomes possible, a freedom from looking into self which
enables men to love and lose themselves in others; to win
power by taking into themselves a thousand influences;
to conquer life by the possession of that sound mind which,
Ln Wordsworth. 119

in freedom from the prejudices to which self-considera-
tion gives birth, can sce things and opinions directly as
they are. Hence, and especially because of this, the
religion of Wordsworth is the noblest we possess in our
poetry, and the healthiest.

And, apart from personal religion, if we pass into
the realm of theology, we are rescued in Wordsworth’s
poetry from the sight of our Self in Nature, and enabled to
see God in it. The man who finds in Nature only the
reflection of his own passions and thoughts can only find
God therein in His relation to himself, or his fellow-men.
He sees God only as human, and missing thus all the abso-
lute side of the Deity, his idea of God is very imperfect.
But he who, escaping through passionate love of Nature
from self, looks straight into Nature and sees her as she
is, beholds God not only as personal, but as impersonal,
not only as the human God, but as far beyond humanity ;
and realizes that there is an infinite Sublimity, an eternal
Calm, a glory of Order, Beauty, and Variety, to which
he dare give no name nor allot a human personality, but
which he truly knows is active and loving, wise and of
unweariable power. And our modern theology bitterly
wants that conception. It would tend to free it from its
ceaseless and diseased insistance on humanity alone, and
Ict us loose a little from ourselves.

II. Having now spoken of Wordsworth’s separation of
Man from Nature, and its moral result on his poetry, I
ask what philosophic conception he founded on it. I
shall try to approach it by an analogy. We get a hint
in the first chapter of Genesis that God conceived of
Man and Woman as originally one being, as Man—who
120 Theology tin the English Poets.

held in one person all the male and female qualities, and
as such, was a perfect ideal of Human Nature; that after-
wards He divided this one Being into two persons, having
similar passions, volitions, and appetites, but differently
conditioned by sex; that each of these was the comple-
ment of the other and fitted to unite with one another,
in order that by the mutual play of the divers qualities of
each on the other the education of both might take place ;
and that when both, through this mutual action on each
other, became at one, Human Nature would be again, as
it was at first, complete.

The conception of Wordsworth with regard to Man
and Nature is much the same. The spirit which lives in
each differs as Man differs from Woman, not indeed in
the same, but in a similar manner, but—they differ for
the purpose of union, and there is between them a pre-
ordained fitness. Hach educates the other, and in their
final marriage is the consummation of the perfection of the
human mind and Nature. Here are the lines in which
Wordsworth sketches this conception. It lies at the root
of his Philosophy :

For the discerning intellect of Man,
When wedded to this goodly universe
In love and holy passion, shall find these—

that is, Beauty, Paradise, the Elysian Fields, all ideal
dreams of men—

A simple produce of the common day.

—I, loug before the blissful hour arrives,

Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse
Of this great consummation—and by words
Which speak of nothing more than what we are,
Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep

Of Death, and win the vacant and the vain
Liu Wordsworth. 121

To noble raptures ; while my voice proclaims
How exquisitely the individual Mind

(And the progressive power, perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external World
Is fitted :—and how exquisitely, too—
Theme this but little heard of amoung men—
The external World is fitted to the Mind :
And the creation (by no lower name

Can it be called) which they with blended might
Accomplish :—This is our high argument, *

So the whole grand idea is that God has made these two
—Man and Nature—for one another and to develop each
other, and His mighty object is that we should realise
in the marriage of the mind and the external world the
pre-arranged harmony. It is a sketch which is filled up
in various ways in the minor Poems. It forms the true
burden of the “Excursion” and the “ Prelude.” To
reveal, to explain this underlying unity, to urge us to
realise it by revealing the beauty in Man and Nature, is
in Wordsworth’s thought, the special work of poetry.
“Poetry is the image of Man and Nature,” and the
object of the Poet is to produce such- pleasure in the
individual man by his imaging of Nature and Man as
to induce love of Nature and union with her. “He
considers Man and the objects which surround him as
acting and reacting upon each other, so as to produce
an infinite complexity of pain and pleasure.” ‘He con-
siders Man and Nature as essentially adapted to each

* Preface to the ‘‘ Excursion.” See also the Preface to the ‘ Lyrical
Ballads,” where he says that the Poet is one ‘‘pleased with his own
passions aud volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the
spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar ”—observe,
he says similar, not identical —‘‘volitions and passions as manifested in

the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them
where he does not find them.”
1228 Theology in the English Poets.

other, and the mind of Man as naturally the mirror of
the fairest and most interesting properties of Nature.”*
And when we look into our intuitions and emotions,
when we are with an open heart alone with Nature,
we seem to know that this is a true philosophy. We
ask if Nature, so distinct from us, has no longing to
unite herself to us, to find the complement of her Being
in ours; and we cannot but trace this desire in the
animals which love us, in the pleasure all of them,
when we are kind, take in our company. And what
we' trace in the animals we need not fear to apply
further, at least in the sphere of poetic feeling. There
is a way in which things seem to look at us, and beg
for our affection and sympathy. The trees nod to us, and
we to them, as Emerson said. In hours when we have
most shaken off the coil of self and the troubles of the
world, we are impressed with delight by the love which
all things seem to bear tous. A real emotion, as deep,
but more clear and pure than that awakened by human
love, is kindled in us by the knowledge that the trecs
are whispering their affection in our car, and the brook
singing its song to us, and the flowers adorning them-
selves to please our eye. Nor is there an atom of selfixsh-
ness in this, We are frankly delighted with it, and accept
it with healthy joy. We rejoice as much in the pleasure
which Nature feels in uniting herself to us as in the
pleasure she gives us. And when we feel so, we are our-
selyes purer and kinder, and less envious than at other
times. She loves us and desires the time when her “ mar-

* Preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads,
Ln Wordsworth. 123

riage” with us shall be complete; and when we are most
conscious of that and most give back the wish, then we
know best what St. Paul meant when he said—‘ The
earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the mani-
festation of the sons of God.”

And we, on our part, we also possess this desire of en
Most of us have felt it at times to be unutterable, so
secret and deep is its passion ; and when—rarely indeed,
for they are the most consecrated moments of life—we
have realised the emotion of harmonious alliance with!
the world, I know not if any purely human joy can be
so exquisite. When we cannot realise it, the way in
which our whole nature chafes against the secrecy and
reticence of Nature shows how much the feeling partakes
of true passion, while the very existence of such a passion
prophesies the time when the marriage of the soul to the
soul of Nature shall be accomplished. Men have tried to
explain this longing by saying that it is the human
element which we have projected into Nature, or that it
is our own thought there to which we desire to reunite our-
selves. It may be, they say, that the trees and the stream
are really we, and that we love ourselves in loving them ;
and Philosophy claps her hands and says that she has
settled the question for Poetry. But the contradiction of
that is rapid and instinctive; in the realm of feeling it is
impossible to believe it; one cannot love oneself in that
‘manner. Moreover, whenever we are in that humour,
when we try to say that the life of waters, clouds, and
leaves is but “the eddying of our living soul,” it is
curious with what a mocking spirit they look upon us:
walk in the woods with only that idea, or by the sea,
124 Theology in the English Poets.

and every tree and wave will say to you—“ you find my
secret, little fellow!’ *

But a single rush of love to the great spirit who lives
there will make her open her arms and heart to you.
Turn to the trees and waves, as to friends, in that sudden
expansion which one feels at times to human friends and
in which all barriers melt, and there will not be a blade
of grass nor a drift of cloud which will not partake its
life with you, teach you its lesson, interpose between you
heart and yourself its kindness, whisper to you infinite
secrets and fill you with joy and calm.

How bountiful is Nature ; he shall find
Who seeks not, and to him that hath not asked, ‘a
Large measure shall be dealt. ;

Eydanm fly Be Fe”

This is the task of Nature, and she fulfils it at the
command of God, or rather it is God himself who in all
her life gives us this education and help; and teaches us
of Himself through her.

In the “ lixeursion,” book iv., Wordsworth traces this
work of hers into distant times. Long, long ago it began:
Man was not left to himself to corrupt in apathy ;

to feel the weight
GE his own reason, without sense or thought

Of higher reason and a purer will,
To benefit and bless, through mighticr power. vy? ee

cee

YX
The Persian, when he sacrificed ‘to ‘Moon and stars,
and to the winds, and mother elements,” felt through

* Que remembers Emerson’s phrase—‘‘ Nature will not have us fret
“orfume. She does not like our benevolence or learning much better
‘than she likes our frauds and wars. When we come out of the
“Caucus, or the bank, or the Abolition Convention, or the Trans-
“ cendental Club, into the fields and woods, she says to us, ‘So hot, my
“ ¢ little sir.’ ”
In Wordsworth. 125

them “a sensitive existence and a God.” The Chaldwan
shepherds entered the invisible world through the thoughts
which the moving planets and the still star of the Pole
awakened in their minds; the Greek idolatrously served a
hundred gods :

And yet—triumphant o’er this pompous show

Of art, this palpable array of sense,

On every side encountered ; in despite

Of the gross fictions chanted in the streets

By wandering Rhapsodists ; and in contempt

Of doubt and bold denial hourly urged

Amid the wrangling schools—a spirié hung,

Beautiful region ! o’er thy towns and farms,

Statues and temples, and memorial tombs :
: 3 on i
And emanations were perceived ;~— ies araeen 1 72 7

For Nature spoke through the things of sense and told
of spirit; and when the votary, thankful for his son’s
return, shed his severed locks upon Cephisus’ river, then

Doubtless, sometimes, when the hair was shed

Upon the flowing stream, a thought arose

Of Life continuous, Being unimpaired ;

That hath been, is, and where it was and is

There shall endure. Sptiootee ira

This was the work of Nature teaching an indefinite
religion, telling of God to men who knew Him not,
speaking of the infinite world beyond, through the
emotions which the finite roused.
And now, in our later times, such training has gone-so
far, that we would not give to the trees or brook a wild
half-human soul, and make a Dryad or a Naiad take their
place; for that would be to lose the tree or the brook itself.
We keep the natural object, but we know within it is the
life of God. Jt tells us in its own way part of tel
126 Theology tn the Enghsh Poets.

character of our Father. It is one of the forms He takes
to us. Listen to Wordsworth speaking of the brook that
the poet and the painter sought :

If wish were mive some type of thee to view,

Thee and not thee thyself, I would not do

Like Grecian artists—

No Naiad shouldst thou be—

(Tt seems the Eternal Soul is clothed in thee?

With purer robes than those of flesh and blood,

And hath bestowed on thee a safer good,

Unwearied joy, and life without its cares.

Then transferring in another place the same thought from |
one object to all objects, he sees in the whole universe the’
revealer of God to Man—the great Evangelist to Man.
““T have seen ”’—the lines are well-known—

A curious child, who dwelt upon a tract

Of inland ground, applying to his ear

The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell.

To which, in silence hushed, his very soul
Listened intensely ; and his countenance soon
Brightened with joy ; for from within were heard
Murmurings, whereby the monitor expressed
Mysterious union with its native sea.

Even such a shell the universe itself

Is to the car of Faith ; and there are times

I doubt not, when to you it doth impart
Authentic tidings of invisible things ;

Of ebb and flow, and ever-during power ;
And central peace, subsisting at the heart

Of endless agitation. Jere you stand,
Adore, and worship, when you know it not;
Pious beyond the intention of your thought ;
Devout above the meaning of your wil, —~

Tt is God then who unites Nature to us, and directs her

teaching; it is His life acting on ours.
But in order to be able to receive her training there
Li Wordsworth. 127 |

must be certain qualities in us. What are these in Words-
worth’s philosophy? They are the qualities of the child.
The first is the simple heart which loves and to which the
world is sweet, it knows not why. We then accord the
measure of our hearts to the music of His power who attunes
the world to love; and loving things we know them. But
our meddling intellect, working without love, misshapes
the beauty of the world. It can only divide and subdivide,
and isolate for discussion thing from thing, element from
element. It cannot see the living, thinking, feeling
whole:

It substitutes an universe of death

For that which moves with light and life informed,

Actual, divine and true, Partede Kv, /bo-lhe
The world, which Science “ examines, ponders, searches,
vexes, criticises,” is not the real life of things; and
Nature refuses to speak to those who prize

the transcendent universe

No more than as a mirror that reflects :
To proud self-love her own intelligence, % 6 avi e- a

_

But to those who enter her kingdom with that listening
love of a child which watches and receives, she gives her
teaching :

One moment now may give us more

Than years of toiling reason ;

Our minds shall drink at every pore _ ; Bs

The spirit of the season. Satin $f + e
But Wordsworth never meant to depreciate the nobler
Science, but only that which, striving after no vast ideal
conception of the whole, pored alone over what it could
hold in its hands and fixed itself exclusively on phe-

nomena, Wordsworth disliked, as much as Socrates
128 Theology in the English Poets.

did, the people who would believe in nothing or con-
sider nothing but that which lay before their eyes. But
the larger science of to-day, such as Faraday practised,
which works through imagination as well as through
experiment and observation, he would not have disliked.
From geometric science, for example, he drew

A pleasure quiet and profound, a seuse

Of permanent and universal sway,

And permanent belief—there, recognised

A type, for finite natures, of the one

Supreme existence, the surpassing life

Which—to the boundaries of space and time,

Of melancholy space and doleful time,

Superior and incapable of change,

Not touched by welterings of passion—is

And hath the name of God, ie Cade Vi. (30-199

Another quality which fits us to receive the training of
Nature is reverence, the food and source of admiration.
The scornful spirit is the blind spirit and the un-
thoughtful one; and to its blindness Nature displays in
vain her beauty, and Man his wonderful life ; contempt
sees nothing, and seeing nothing has no materials for
thought. He who feels it for any living thing—and when
Wordsworth says “ living thing” he means things which
we call inanimate, as well as things animate—
hath faculties

Which he hath never used, and thought with him
Is in its infancy. ; &

But he who bends in loving reverence before the beauty
and majesty of the universe, receives its teaching at every
pore,

But of all qualities, the two most necessary were purity
In Wordsworth, 129

of heart and unworldliness of character, and in Words-
worth’s thought they mingled into one. There is one
well-known sonnet which enshrines this belief of his
in a statement of its opposite.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers :
Little we see in Nature that is ours ;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon !
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon ;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are upgathered now like sleeping flowers ;
For this —for everything, we are out of tune ;
Tt moves us not, Sao eee

‘

And in a letter he says the same thing—“It is an
awful truth, that there neither is, nor can be, any genuine
enjoyment of poetry among nineteen out of twenty of
those persons who live, or wish to live, in the broad
light of the world—among those who either are, or are
striving to make themselves, persons of consideration in
society. This is a truth, and an awful one, because to be
incapable of a feeling for poetry, in my sense of the
word, is to be without love of human nature and rever-
ence for God,”

Now as these qualities are found chiefly in their purity
in the child, it is then that the work of Nature, as
Education, begins, Of what that work is, and how it is
carried on, he has given two examples—one in the first
book of the “Excursion,” another in tracing his own
growth under the influences of Nature in the “Prelude.”
Of these two I will give an analysis.

He traces in the first the history of a Highland child,
early thrown into solitary life among the hills. As he

K
130 Theology in the English Poets.

came home at evening and saw the hills grow larger in
the mist, and the stars steal out in the infinite expanse,
and felt the horror of the pine wood in his heart, he
received impressions of greatness and its power, inde-
finite, but full of force to awaken and develop feeling.
These feelings, in their turn, reacted on the forms of
Nature till the impressions they made became like real
existences in his soul. Image after image thus received
and made into living things, soon made him uncon-
sciously mingle up the living image in his soul with
the natural image of which it was the counterpart;
till he slowly began to feel that every image became
living in him, not only because he gave it life, but also
because the object which produced it possessed a life of
its own which, coming to the life in him, stirred and
kindled it into creation.

And ’mid the hollow depths of naked crags
He sate—and e’en in their fixed lineaments—
Or from the power of a peculiar eye,

Or by creative feeling overborne,

Or by predominance of thought oppressed,
Even in their fixed and steady lineaments

He traced an ebbing and a flowing mind,
Expression ever varying. « _ 7 fo fs.

po

This was the work of the awe which Nature produces
in the child—a sense of sublimity, and of life as the
source of that sublimity.

As he grew, the fear which somewhat spoiled the awe
died away ; and when it perished and awe alone was left,
then the whole vast world Being, when, at the sunrise,
it appeared to him from the mountain top, drenched in
light as with joy, and all its glory seeming to him—trained
Lu Wordsworth, 131

as he was to feel that Nature was alive—not glory only but
love, awoke unspeakable love in him. His mind became
one mighty sacrifice of gratitude and love to God. And this
reacted on the religion he had learnt and added to it the
element of feeling. He had received revealed Religion
at his mother’s knee, had given it his reverence, but it
yet was cold to emotion. But it was different now;
emotion had come to him from Nature, and his spirit
was stirred to feel it towards the things of Faith,
A Herdsman on the lonely mountain tops,

Such intercourse was his, and in this sort

Was his existence oftentimes possessed.

O then how beautiful, how bright, appeared

The written promise! Early had he learned

To reverence the volume that displays

The mystery, the life which cannot die ;

But in the mount ins did he fect his faith.

All things, respons ve to the writing, there

Breathed immort.l:ty, revolving life,

And greatness still revolving ; infiuite :

There littleness was not ; the least of things

Seemed infinite ; and there his spirit shaped

Her prospects, nor did he believe,—he saw, :
OX Peet oO

That is the sketch given of this early education by Nature in
the ‘Tixcursion.” It resembles in one or two points the
more elaborate one given in the ‘‘ Prelude,” which I analyse
now, and which is the history of Wordsworth himself.
Even from his birth he holds that Nature was his friend.
The ‘“ ceaseless music’? of Derwent flowed through his
infant dreams, and gave him an unconscious foretaste,
a dim earnest of the calm

That Nature breathes among the hills and groves.

} Then, as he became a boy her real work began to tell,
K 2
132 Theology in the English Poets.

As before, it began with vague impressions of fear.
When at night upon the moors, so profound was the vast
impression of peace, he felt his bustling presence almost
a trouble in the calm of skies and earth. There, when
conscience touched him (having robbed the prey of another’s
trap than his own), Nature herself was felt as the
avenger. Low breathings came after him, and steps
“silent as the turf they trod,” were heard among iho
solitary hills.

Did he, as cragsman, shoulder the naked crag and cling
to the perilous ridge ?—then, if his courage held, Nature
was his companion; if it gave way, she became his de-
stroyer. Did he, half by stealth, row on the lake when
evening fel] ?—then, the huge peak which suddenly rose
upon his view seemed to be instinct with voluntary power,
and stride after him with a purpose of its own; and for
days afterwards his brain

Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of Being,—

half glimpses of the Dweller on the threshold, { ~~"
These were the vague impressions, mostly of dim yet
delightful Fear, which repeated in many forms and woven
together, not confusedly but as notes which fell into har-
mony, began to build up his character. For such impres-
sions stirred in him germs of feeling—the sense of moral
wrong, the sense of indefinite sublimity, the sense of a
vast and invisible /’/e without himself. And these germs
of emotion, becoming conscious of themselves, were sent
back to Nature, and ylade the impressions which wero
afterwards received £ her more vivid, more infinite,
Ln Wordsworth. 13 37

more overwhelming: and they in turn stirred deeper emo-
tion in him, and the deeper emotion again found itself
met by amightier answer—till in the mutual play of action
thus established, his character grew daily into form. His.
mind began to be married to the external world and the
external world to it; the first steps of that union were
made which, when fulfilled, should make up that ‘calm
existence which was to be his when he was worthy of
himself.”

It was the living Soul of the universe which was doing
this work; a personal Being, ever melting on the skirts
of consciousness into the impersonal. The eternal Thought
that watches over the Thought of men, watched over his
development; and itself linked to the majestic forms and
scenes of Nature, acted through them upon his soul, and
wrought in him the passions that build up character,
and the ideals that ennoble it.

Wisdom and Spirit of the universe !
Thou Soul that art the Eternity of thought,
That giv’st to forms and images a breath
And everlasting motion, not in vain
By day or starlight thus, from my first dawn
Of childhood, didst thou intertwine for me
The passions that build up our human soul ;
Not with the mean and vulgar works of man,
But with high objects, with enduring things—
With life and nature—purifying thus
The elements of feeling and of thought,
And sauctifying, by such discipline,
Both pain and fear, until we recognise
A grandeur in the beatings of the heart... aes J

Nor did this mutual intercourse cease ity movement for

a moment. By day and night, summer and winter, the
silent education went on till at last he felt the ‘ Presence
134 Theology in the English Poets.

of Nature in the sky and on the earth,” and saw the
“Visions of the hills,” and spoke with the “ Souls of
lonely places,” and, in dim perception—but without an
intellectual form being given to the feeling—felt that
the whole world was alive and speaking to him as his
companion, greater than himself, but yet at one with
him. Each of these presences, visions, souls, ministered
to him, haunted him, partook of his danger and desire,
and had a distinct desire and danger of their own; till, at
last, as examples multiplied of this intercommunion (and
what the forms of nature said were met at once by a
response in his own heart, that fitted the impressions
made), the whole earth became like a great Being and,

With triumph and delight, with hope and fear,
Worked like a sea,

The whole of this is an explanation given in after life of that
which he insensibly felt as a child. There was no reason-
ing possible then. It was a wild tempestuous time, full
of giddy bliss, and the physical joy of being: and the
images he received from nature partook of this wild and
even vulgar character, images undignified by any associa-
tion, made quiet by no thoughtfulness.

But (and here is another element in the education
Nature gives the child) in the midst of this wild extrava-
gance of boyish life with nature, there were moments of
quietness in which a calmer beauty, of which he was then
unconscious, entered into his soul and took up there its
dwelling.

Looking back on them, he sees them as a part of that
great work by which the universe and the mind of Man
Ln Wordsworth. 135

are wedded together. They are the result of that pre- |
established harmony which God has set between His:
thought in us and His thought in Nature. He calls them, '
in lines as beautiful as they are profound,

Those hallowed and pure motions of the sense

Which seem, in their simplicity, to own

An intellectual charm : that calm delight

Which, if I err not, surely must belong

To those first-born affinities that fit

Our new existence to existing things ;

And, in our dawn of being, constitute

The bond of union between life and joy. :

Ach ly /, ST $s

By both were sown the first seeds of a deep love of nature
which now began to take the place of a dim dread of her.
The quieter impressions remained as they were; the com
mon and vulgar joys through which the others were
received slowly died out of the memory; but the impres-
sions remained and their beauty. His mind became filled
with solemn and lovely images; he linked those images to
the places from which he had received them, and loved
the places for their sake. In this way, year by year
Nature grew more dear, and with his love to her his
soul grew into completer being.

It was thus the Poet’s education began. How it went
on, I shall tell in my next lecture. But does it not do
one good to read of it? How pure and fresh it is; how
healthy and natural, how true to Nature and how near to
God. For so ought always to begin, if possible, the
building of the soul. Natural Religion should go before
spiritual ; vague feelings of joy and calm in the presence
of One whom we know not yet, but who knows us—in
these best begins the religion which afterwards in the
136 Theology in the English Poets.

sadness and trouble of life teaches us to know that Presence
in Nature as the Father in our hearts; in these best
arises that spiritual life which, at first content with
nature-worship,—learns, when it has become sadly con-
scious of sin and sorrow, to love God as the Redeemer.
and to trust Him as the Comforter.
Li Wordsworth. ia7

LECTURE VII.

WORDSWORTH.

-Tu simple ways in which the childhood of Words-
worth walked, and how he was taught by the rivers, woods
and hills, were spoken of in my last lecture. The educa-
cation thus. begun by Nature was carried on steadily, and
I shall explain its further course to-day. It divides itself
into two parts, the first period when the influences of
Nature were unconsciously received ; the second, when the
new element of the relation of his own soul to Nature
slowly introduced itself. For, becoming conscious of his
own being, he became also conscious of its distinctness
from the external world, and of the power and life which
he was able to project from it over Nature—conscious, that
is, of that action and reaction between the mind and the
world without, the possibility of which was contained in.
the prearranged harmony which God had established
between them. This point I shall fully speak of, and also
how far this consciousness of the soul of its relation to
Nature modified the continuous education which Nature
gave him.

And throughout, and after nearly every point, I shall
mark how the various lessons he learnt influenced or were
likely to influence the poetic character of Wordsworth, the
138 Theology in the English Poets.

growth of his religious life, and those theological ideas
which he held with regard to the relation of God and Man
to the Natural world.

Wordsworth begins the second book of the “Prelude”
by a description of the tumultuous joy and eagerness of
boyhood in its sports among a rich and varied scenery.
Looking back in tranquil manhood to this unconscious
time, he half sighs to think that these things are no more.
It tames our “pride of intellect and self-esteem of
virtue,” to think how little we can give

to duty and to truth
The eagerness of infantine desire.

So that an ideal of eagerness in pursuit of things, and a
respect for the enthusiasm which makes us unconscious of
self, are part of the indirect teaching which we receive
from Nature in boyhood. They were two lessons which
formed part of his poetic training, for a poet is one who
is bound to lose himself in Beauty and Truth, and to see
things more eagerly than other men. And they have
also their moral influence, for it inspirits a man who has
strength enough for self-restoration, to know in after-life,
in times of depression and pain, that he has once possessed
joy and force; for then he believes in their existence in his
nature, and works towards their recovery. And this is
one of the continually recurring moral ideas of Words-
worth, You will find it running through a hundred
poems.

But this kind of teaching that Nature now gave him
was not consciously received by the boy; nor-was it direct,
but incidental. It could not be consciously sought for ;
Ln Wordsworth. 139

but it came suddenly, in flashes of impulse in the midst
of holiday delights. On Windermere were lovely and
lonely islands, and to these he and his companions rowed
in rivalry. But when they landed and wandered among
the lilies or beneath the oaks or by the ruined shrine,
emulation, jealousy, and pride were insensibly tempered by
the stillness of the place, so that they did not care, after
a time, whether they had the crown of boyish fame or no.

It was such silent influences of Nature frequently
repeated that instilled drop by drop into Wordsworth’s
being that “ quiet independence of the heart,” that sense
of

The self-sufficing power of solitude,

so remarkable in him afterwards as man and poet.

Again, in the midst of noisy sport, a single, sharp
impression came, the voice of Nature, not in rebuke of
their delight, but in her desire to make herself felt, which
stilled them for a moment into thoughtfulness. Once in
St. Mary’s nave the sudden song of the wren singing ul
herself, invisible, made one of those hushed surprises
which no one can ever forget. Sometimes, pausing for a
moment when racing home, the sound of streams among
rocks and the “still spirit shed from evening air’? made
their presence felt in his heart. Sometimes when the
games were over, and the minstrel of their troop blew his
flute alone on the island, and they lay resting and listen-
ing upon the lake, the whole scene entered into his soul :

The calm
And dead still water lay upon my mind
Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky,

Never before so beautiful, sank down
Into my heart, and held me like a dream.
140 Theolozy in the English Poets.

He imputes the same experience to the boy, his play-
mate who lived by Winander, and of whom he tells in a
famous passage. After describing him as in wild mirth
he stood by the shore of the lake and blew hootings to
the owls that answered till all the hills re-echoed—he
marks how, suddenly, in the midst came a lengthened
pause of silence. Then it was that the invisible quiet
Life in the world spoke to him.

Then sometimes, in that silence while he hung
Listening—a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carricd far into his heart the voice

Of mountain torrents: or the visible sceno
Would enter unawares into his mind,

With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,

Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received
Into the bosom of the steady lake,

Those are the lines of which Coleridge said,— Had I
met these lines running wild in the deserts of Arabia, I
should instantly have screamed out—Wordsworth.” But
the deep meaning of them is, that there is in the material
universe a spirit at work on us, to calm, to exalt, and to
suggest to our boyhood thoughts which sleep within like
seeds, till future events develop them.

And now, accumulating from every quarter, these acci-
dental impressions enlarged his sympathies till every day
some new scene in Nature becoming dear, the conception
of Nature as an organic Being, having a life beyond his,
and existing in a direct relation to him, began, not to
be realized, but to quicken in his mind.

A change then took place. Nature had been secondary
in his life; his boyish sports were first, and she had
intervened among them with these surprises. She was
Ln Wordsworth, 41

the seeker, he the sought. But now, he sought her
directly for the pleasure she gave. She had conquered
his unthinking pleasure in play and replaced it by the
enthusiasm of herself. He did not know well why he
sought her, but a trouble came into his mind, which drove
him away from the sports of boyhood. They had been the
props of the impressions he had received from Nature.
But, behold, when the scaffolding was removed, there
was the building, sustained by its own spirit, the building
of the love of natural Beauty and Life, a house not made
with hands. Hence, the trouble was the first trouble of a
youth who was leaving boyhood and who had begun to
realize consciously all he had learnt unconsciously. It
was such a trouble as moved the waters of the Bethesda
spring.

The sensibility of his soul to Nature now went directly
and with known purpose to commune with her. It was
like two lovers who had seen one another only at inter-
vals meeting at last for daily communion. Every hour
brought new happiness, because it brought new knowledge
of the life of things. And the source of the knowledge
was love, refined to intense watchfulness by desire.
Formerly he had received large indefinite impressions,
now he saw into the “transitory qualities” of Bice. |
such as, if I may explain the phrase by an illustration,
the subtle changes in colour of the lime-tree leaves as
summer draws on day by day from spring, or the
difference of the sound of a brook in winter and
summer, or the way in which a passing cloud will alter
the whole sentiment of a landscape, or even closer still,
the way in which a sudden stroke of life will enlighten a
142 Theology in the English Poets.

lonely place; as when, in one of his own inintitable
touches, he says of a lonely mountain lake—

There sometimes doth a leaping fish

Send through the tarn a lonely. cheer.
Running along with these numberless small impressions,
and derived from them, were “ gentle agitations of the
mind” from observation of these manifold differences,
so that whatever came from Nature was answered by
a different but correspondent feeling, and that marriage
of the soul and the world began to grow towards its
fulfilment.

One might object that this minute habit of observance
would take away from the Poet the power of receiving a
grand impression of the whole. On the contrary, when
the soul is freely recciving, and this sort of work is done
by the feeling, and not by the understanding, it prepares
the soul, by kindling and quickening emotion, for a
sublime impression. Nay more, since it brings the know-
ledge of particulars, it educates us for the moment when
the vast, single conception of the Whole dawns like a
sun upon the mind.

But this has its stages of growth in single impressions,
made by separate scenes of sublimity and calm, and
Wordsworth dwells on both. I would walk alone, he says,

Under the quiet stars, and at that time

Have felt whate’er there is of power in sound
To breathe au elevatcd mood, by form

Or image unprofaned ; and I would stand,

If the night blackened with a coming storm,
Beneath some rock, listening to notes that are
The ghostly language of the ancient earth,
Or make their dim abode in distant winds.
Thence did I drink the visionary power :
Ln Wordswarth. 143

These moments were the origin of an ideal of sublimity.|
In after life, we forget what we felt, but not how we felt
at such times: remembrance of the way in which we have
been impressed creates and supports the obscure sense of
a sublimity possible to the soul, to which with growing
faculties the soul aspires—

feeling still
That whatsoever point they gain, they yet
Have something to pursue.

To have such an ideal is in itself a kind of religion.
And Wordsworth, in the “ Excursion,” taking up the same
point, shows how an ideal _of sublimity, won in early life
from Nature, will make a man impatient of any pettiness
of temper or life, of any wanting in noble simplicity, of
any want of directness, of any of those meannesses, which,
though they seem only paltry, have their root in some
foulness or other. Nor will he ever become basely con-
tent. He shall feel

congenial stirrings late and long
In spite of all the weakness that life brings—

however tranquil—

Wake sometimes to a noble restlessness.

Correlative with sublimity is calm; it is the other side
of the shield. The power which, in Nature, moves the
mind to delight, and which arises from her inner order,
made her hours of calm produce calm in him. Anda
certain love of calm in himself strengthened the impres-
sion. When, in early morning walks, he saw beneath him
the valley sleeping in the lonely dawn—“ How shall I
seek the origin,” he breaks out:
144 Theology in the English Poets.

Where find
Faith in the marvellous things which then I felt?

z

Oft in these moments such a holy calm ;
Would overspread my soul, that bodily eyes
Were utterly forgotten, and what I saw
Appeared like something in myself, a dream,
A prospect in the mind.

This was also destined to grow into an ideal, and it was
necessary for his poetic work. One must have the power of
compelling rest in the soul in order to work nobly. Nor
is that self-control which can use passion and not be used
by it, less needful for the man than for the Poet. . It is
not the calm of indifference which we want in order to
be great, but the calm which Will and temperance produce
in a nature capable of storm, The perfect moral work}
of life is done by him who has passion, but who subdues’
it to the workable point of heat.

From the time, now, that he had sought Nature
directly, he had gained two things; a multitude of minute
impressions awakening a multitude of thoughts: a sense
of sublimity and of calm, which the work of his own soul
was to change into moral ideals of them. So far the pre-
paration for the grasp of Nature as a great whole had gone.

But something more was needed, the influence of his)
onn soul on Nature; and this now began to be felt.
Looking back, as he writes, on that time, he knew that
his soul had been insensibly at work on the impressions
Nature had given it. This was true, he thought, even
of his infancy. The infant is frail and helpless then, yet
he is

\

|

An inmate of this active universe ;
For feeling has to him imparted power
That through the growing faculties of sense
Ln Wordsworth. 145

Doth like an agent of the one great Mind
Create, creator and receiver both,
Workivg but iu alliance with the works
Which it beholds,

The lines re-illustrate the philosophic view of the dis-
tinctiveness of Nature and man on which I have dwelt,
and in this mutual reaction of the two, and in having it,
consciously in manhood, unconsciously in childhood, is the
poetic spirit ;
Such, verily, is the first

Poctic spirit of our human life,

By uniform control of after years,

In most, abated or suppressed ; in some

Through every change of growth and of decay,
Pre-eminent till death.

In becoming conscious, then, of this interaction he first
began to be a poet.

Therefore he now knew that, unsubdued by the torrent
of natural glory and beauly poured into his heart, he
retained a plastic power, to form and shape the images he
received, Nay more, though his mind was still subservient
to Nature, it gave back a glory of its own to Nature:

An auxiliar light
Came from my mind, which on the setting sun
Bestowed new splendour:

And the midnight storm
Grew darker in the presence of my eye.

Added to this was the power of imagination, which brought
into poetic relation remotely connected objects, and which
transferred his own enjoyments and passions to inorganic
natures. Yet when he says that he did that, he feels that,
he is partly untrue to his special view of the difference

r
146 Theology in the English Poets.

between man and Nature; and he says that this trans-
ference of himself to Nature was perhaps due to an excess
in the great social principle of life which naturally coerced
all things into sympathy—or, on the other hand, that he
did not really impose himself on Nature, but conversed
with things as they really were, with the enjoyments and
passions, that is, of Nature herself. But however that
might be, the end of all this was, that what he had uncon-
sciously felt as a boy became at last a conscious possession ;
he realized that all Nature was(one great organic Being,)
with whom he could commune through the means of love,
who directly communed with him, and whose ceaseless
prayer and anthem was the adoration and love of God.

Thus while the days flew by aad years passed on,
From Nature and her over-flowiug soul,
Thad received so much that all my thoughts
Were steeped in feeling. I was only theu
Coutented, when with bliss ineffable
T felt the sentiment of Being spread
O’er all that moves and all that seemeth still ;
O’er all that, lost beyond the reach of thought
And human knowledge, to the human eye
Invisible, yet liveth to the heart.

Wonder not
If high the transport, great the joy I felt,
Communing in this sort through earth and heaven
With every form of creature, as it looked
Towards the Uucreated with a countenance
Of adoration, with an eye of love.
One song they sang, and it was audible,
Most audible, then, when the fleshly ear,
O’ercome by humblest prelude of that strain,

Forgot her functions, aud slept undisturbed. Doyen
stwae

It is a wonderful picture of a youthful life—this young
and solitary creature, living in communion only with the
Ln Wordsworth. 147

Being of the World, in a world which only lived to him
and to God who sees the heart.

He had now reached his seventcenth year, and the
results of his experience were these—he was conscious
of the direct influence of Nature on him; of his own
mind and the power it had to speak with and to answer
Nature; and of both Nature. and. Himself asliving powers
acting on.cach..ather. With these was united a vague
sentiment of religion, which chiefly appeared in a simple,
pure and manly morality of life. /This, he held, was the
direct result of the work of Nature upon his soul, and look-
ing back on his life then and afterwards, and summing up
the result, it is to this early association with the beautiful
and sublime things of the outward world that he traces
the whole quiet, and faithful, and temperate character of
his life, and of his self-training as a Poet. The passage
is long, but it is necessary to quote it, and it completes
the history of his boyhood. It follows directly on the last
quotation.

If this be error and another faith

Find easier access to the pious mind,

Yet were I grossly destitute of all

Those human sentimeuts that make this carth
So dear, if I should fail with grateful voice
To speak of you, ye mountains, and ye lakes
And sounding cataracts, ye mists and winds
That dwell among the hills where I was born.
If in my youth I have been pure in heart,

If, mingliug with the world, 1 am contcnt
With my own modest pleasures, and have lived
With God and Nature communing, removed
From little enmities and low desires,

The gift is yours; if in these times of fear,

This melancholy waste of hopes o’erthrown,
Ir, ’mid indifference and apathy,
148 Theology in the English Poets,

And wicked exultation when good men
On every side fall off, we know not how,
To selfishness, disguised in gentle names
Of peace and quiet and domestic love,
Yet mingled not unwillingly with sneers
On visionary minds; if, in this time
OF dereliction and dismay, I yet
Despair not of our nature, but retain
A morc than Roman confidence, a faith
That fails not, in all sorrow my support,
The blessing of my life; the gift is yours,
Ye winds and sounding cataracts ! tis yours,
Ye mountains ! thine, O Nature! Thou hast fed
My lofty speculations ; and in thee,
Yor this uneasy heart of ours, I find
A never-failing principle of joy
And purest passion.
Prelude, Bk. ii, /”

He now passed, thus educated by Nature, out of her
special guidance, aud went to Cambridge as a student.
It was a strange change from the solitary glen. He was
excited, full of spirit and hope, and when he saw the
turrets of the University rising in the distance, he
felt his heart racing before him. He puts with one of
his characteristic touches his own feeling into the place
itself;

As near and nearer to the spot we drew
Tt seemed to suck us in with an eddy’s force,

Tle entered, and was at once full of the blithe delight of a
young fellow, fresh from the hills, to whom everything
was new. “I was the dreamer, they the dream His new
dress—and he became a dandy—the society, the lecture-
rooms, the motley spectacle, the sound of frequent bells

at night, the antechapel of Trinity where the statue
stool—
In Wordsworth, 149

Of Newton, with his prism and silent faco,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alozo~

all dazzled him at first, and he forgot his early aspira-
tions. But he soon returned to his more natural self, and
felt even the more for this short forgetfulness, how native
were his poetic instincts. Prizes, examinations and their
fame, for these things he had no care; and the little
‘interests of the place were not great enough for one
accustomed to the solemn and awful interests of Nature.
He was not, he felt, for that hour nor for that place. And
we must hold that he was right. Special gifts have!
special duties, and they override the duties incumbent on
ordinary men. It might be the duty of this or that youth:
to read for a prize; it was Wordsworth’s instinct, and the

instinct may be called a duty, not todo so. It marks the

strong and independent character of his mind that he tat
so early in life, that the bent of his genius set him apart, |
and must be followed. The mountains had taught him

wisdom, and he turned—even in the fen-country, and

among men—to Nature again, and looked in her for

universal things, ‘and called on the earth and sky to

“teach him what they might.” And when they spoke,

he turned into himself, and asked what. their revelations

were in him, till he felt, as he had felt in his native glen,

that they were in truth “ visitings of the Upholder of
the tranquil soul.” And receiving these, he recognized

with joy a new. power. in his own soul, and sending it.
forth to work on Nature, found in her life enjoyments and:
passions similar but not identical with his own.
150 Theology in the English Poets.

To every natural form, rock, fruit, or flower,
Even the loose stones that cover the high-way,
I gave a moral life: I saw them feel,
Or linked them to some feeling : the great mass
Lay bedded in a quickening soul, and all
That I beheld respired with inward meaning.
And that whate’er of Terror or of Love
Or Beauty Nature’s daily face put on
From transitory passion, unto this
“T was as sensitive as waters are
To the sky’s influence in a kindred mood
Of passion; was obedient as a lute
That waits upon the touches of the wind.
Unknown, unthought of, yet I was most rich—
I had a world about me —’twas my own ;
I made it, for it only lived to me,
And to the God who sees into the heart.
Prelude, Bk, iil, pagan

Sometimes he betrayed his joy in all this by gestures,
and those who saw him called it madness. And it
was madness, he says—

Tf childlike fruitfulness in passing joy,
If steady moods of thoughtfulness matured
To inspiration, suit with such a name,

Nor could that be well called madness, in which there
was so intense a development of what one might call the
logic of the eye—
For the bodily eye

Amid my strongest workings evermore

Was searching out the lines of difference

As they lie hid in all external forms,

Near or remote, minute or vast; an eye

Which, from a tree, a stone, a withered leaf,

To the broad ocean and the azure heavens

Spangled with kindred multitudes of stars,

Could find no surface where its power might sleer. ;

Which spake perpetual logic to my soul,

And by an unrelenting agency

Did bind my feelings even as in a chain.
In Wordsworth. ry

Is not that a splendid commentary upon the passionate
minuteness of his natural description—“ Could find no
surface where its power might sleep ?”

It was thus that Nature continued to exercise her'

power over him, and moulded even his University life.,
He was kept, by the continuance of her influence, from.

overwork, and from that tendency of a college career to
lessen originality. At the same time the lively society, the
first clash of life with other men, lessened the somewhat.
overwhelming influence of Nature, and not only prepared
him for his future interest in mankind, but stirred to life
those germs of it which had been insensibly sown in the
north. The idle life was also, I think, good for him; he
wanted idleness and repose; there was no need for him to
do anything but drift and have that ‘“ wise passiveness ”’
which he afterwards recommends, but which he took then
as unconsciously as a child. In these first months then,
he read the face of Nature, he read Chaucer, Spencer,
Milton, he amused himself and rested—and since he was
Wordsworth, he could not have done better.

Bat the time spent at Cambridge was not without its
special influence: a human element, as I said, crept into
his life. When, then, after eight months’ absence, he re-
‘turned to his mountain home, he found that certain changes
had been wrought in his relation to Nature. He hada
human heartedness about the love he bore to objects lately
the absolute wealth of his own private being. He had
loved rocks and brooks and stars as one Angel might love
another—now human feelings and changes were connected
with them, and a pensive shade stole over Nature. It
was no longer only sublimity or calm which he felt, but
152 Theology in the English Poets.

something kinder, sweeter —an inner touch of love,
delight or hope. His human soul, awakened by life
among men, began to wed Humanity to Nature, and
out of that came the first emotional feeling of a personal
-religion. It was on a day when the hour of evening was
‘‘ sober, the air untuned.” It influenced him like the
face of a friend in trouble, thrilling him through and
through with love and pain. And in the air of this
emotion, strength and comfort, which “he only knew he
needed when they came,” entered his heart, and with
them came “ inward hopes, and swellings of the spirit,”

glimmering views
How life pervades the undecaying mind—
How the immortal soul with godlike power
Informs, creates, and thaws the deepest sleep
That time can lay upon her ;
Prelude, Bk. iv,

—the sense of the majestic strength of man if he will but
live in the “light of high endeavour,” and the glory of
the close that endurance wins.

The second religious impression was a deeper and more
important one. It made a crisis in his life, and it is
worth remarking that it came not as the first in the
sombreness of evening, but in the freshness of dawn.

When he returned from Cambridge, he had felt not
only more human, but also an inner falling off; less fiery
aspiration in his soul, some taint of the world, some

,touch of vanity and its corruption. He could not, as
before, forget himself in Nature. But he was wrong in
this regret. It was a backward motion, but had it not
been, love of Nature could never have passed into love
In Wordsworth. 152

v

of Man. We must often reach the higher by going back
a little, and Wordsworth’s “boundless chase of trivial
pleasure ” was a necessary parenthesis in his education.
Through it the image of mankind had room to creep into
his heart, and in reaction from it he drew nearer to God.
It was in the very midst of this light and thoughtless
gaiety, returning from a rustic ball—just as impressions
of calm and beauty came on his boyhood in the midst of
careless sport—that his highest early revelation broke
upon him. For often in these opposing currents of the life
of man, —and Wordsworth’s life was now a parti-coloured
show of grave and gay—at a moment when the force of
the currents being equal, calm ensues, we are surprised
by the voice of God in the hush of exhausted excite-
ment. It is then that Solitude and Nature do their work,
and we never can forget the surprise. I quote the lines
in which he describes this baptismal hour when he was
consecrated to his lofty work. He is going home after,
a night of merriment :

Magnificent

The morning rose, in memorable pomp.

Glorious as e’er I had beheld—in front

The sea lay laughing at a distance ; near

The solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds,

Grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light ;

And in the meadows and the lower grounds

Was all the swectness of a common dawn--

Dews, vapours, and the melody of birds,

And labourers going forth to till the fields.
_Ah! need I say, dear Friend! that to the brim

My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows

Were then macte for me ; bond unknown to me

Was given, that,I should be, else sinning greatly,

A dedicated Spirit. On I walked

In thankful blesseduess, which yet survives.
154 Lhcology tn the English Poets.

This was the God of Nature speaking in solitude. But
solitude is still more solitary, says Wordsworth, where it
has a human centre, and he finishes his account of his
vacation time by narrating a dull story of his mecting an
old soldier in a lonely road, and how far more deeply the
loneliness sank into his soul, and with benign power
separated him from worldliness, when this appropriate
human centre impressed it on his mind. That would not
have been the case some years before. I note it now
to show how his mind was veering towards interest in
Man as well as in Nature.

The next great religious impressions received through
Nature were made on him during his journey on the
continent, and were more distinctly connected with
Man; one was sublime when he crossed the Alps,
the other beautiful as he wandered through the Italian
lakes. They were prefaced by a certain growth in his
own soul; gladness and tenderness alike had made the
air of thought more fine and pure. And further, the
capacities of his own soul had now been so stirred that it
began to assert itself as creator: the expressing power
had begun to dawn.

It was then, that inspired with desire to see the larger
forms of Nature, he went abroad. There his interest in
Man was still further aroused, for he landed at Calais
and went through France when the land was thrilling
with the first youthful passion of the Revolution. He
joined with the frank pleasure of youth in all the delight
of the land, he felt the excitement of the ideas of the
time even in the midst of the dark solitudes of the
Chartreuse, he looked with the pleasure of a natural
Ln Wordsworth. 155

Republican on the quiet valleys of Switzerland where
men were free. But these things were but incidents in -
the devotion he gave to Nature and in the interest with
which he watched his own soul working upon her. First,
in lighter scenery, it was only that fantastic pensiveness
which we all have felt that came upon him. There were
hours of delightful dejection, like flowers “ gathered from
formal gardens of the Lady Sorrow.” But these in turn
were mixed with others in which a different impression
came, not of the fancy, but wholly of the imagination.
He crossed the Alps, and swept downwards towards Italy
through the gorge of Gondo. There the stupendous powers
of the world of the higher mountains, spoke one language
to him :

The immeasurable height
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
And in the narrow rent at every turn
Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light—
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree :
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of eternity :
Of tirst aud last aud ’midst and without ead. -

Prelude, Bk. vi. He

The majesty and awfulness of the place seized on him
and ravished him beyond himself—he was lost in the
revelation, -The same note is struck in the last verse of
156 Theology in the English Poets.

the hymn of the spirits to Asia, in the Prometheus of
Shelley :

Lamp of Earth, where’er thou movest,
Its dim shapes are clad with brightness,
And the souls of those thou lovest
Walk upon the winds with lightness,
*Till they fail as I am failing,

Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing.

That was something of Wordsworth’s feeling. Nature’
came upon him, imagination rushed into union with
Nature, and in the fierce ardour of their creative embrace
within him he lost all consciousness of self. Shelley could
have stayed there, did stay there; the passionate pleasure
of being lost in the Spirit of Nature through love of it,
would have been enough for him. He would have kept
all his life the memory of that hour of rapture, and felt it
over and over again without ever subjecting it to thought.
Ti was different with Wordsworth; having felt this won-
derful emotion, and wholly lost himself in it at the time,
he returned to it afterwards that he might discover its
meaning. It is perhaps less poetical, it is certainly less
characteristic of the pure artist to do this; but it is just
as well that all poets are not like Shelley, and instead of
contrasting the two methods to the disadvantage of cither
we may be thankful to have the delight of both.

‘ Afterwards, then, Wordsworth looked back on this
(perience, and saw in it the glory of the soul in union
with God. It can usurp sense, and joining itself as
brother to the invisible and spiritual world, enter into that
infinitude of God of which Nature is the voice and symbol.
This is its greatness, this power bespeaks that its true
In Wordsworth. 157

home is in the Eternal, that its rightful world is the world
of aspiration, desire, undying hope,

And something evermore about to be.
And in this the soul is blest in thoughts,

That are their own perfection and reward,
Strong in herself and in beatitude
That hides her.

It was. herepthen,thatuthreugh-a.cublimeimpression-ef
Nature, theknowledve-ofthe-super-eminent pomemabthe
human.soul. which.had.been. growing up in-his- mindywas |
fixed. and. recognized...

Descending into serener beauty, a tenderer. revelation,
came-on hiva-fsomve-denderer-Nature:=He-felt dhedave-
liness and .ealm of-the world .as similar to moral loveli-

 

deed, or r those Sisto E puns Thoualit, |

When God, the Giver of all joy, is thanked
Religiously in silent blessedness.

Nor were such scenes only analogous to: moral-qualities;
he seems,—and it is a thought which, though fantastic,
has its ground in his theory,—to imagine that character-
istic types of landscape had the power of suggesting each
their correspondent virtue to the mind, and of giving to the
heart the sensation, as it were, of that virtue.

So far Nature acted directly wpon him butein-all-these
new.scenesy.as in .the- previous. case; it was*nobewith-
ous his.own action-on herwerk. He asserts his right as
158 Theology in the English Poets.

poet and man to offer no slavish worship in this temple.
He was not prostrate, overborne as Shelley was, by the
splendour of Nature; he never let loose the right of his
own mind to co-operate with her. He began to feel that}
she was the complement of his soul, as natural religion is
the complement of spiritual. He drew on still further!
to the full conception of that marriage of the mind of
Man to the external world which he afterwards fulfilled.
Whatsoever he saw or heard or felt was but “a stream
which flowed into a stream kindred” to it in his own

mind:
A gale,

Confederate with the current of the soul, |
To speed my voyage; every sound or sight,
In its degree of power, administered
To grandeur or to tenderness—to the one
Directly, but to tender thoughts by means
Less often instantaneous in effect ;

And the action of all, in Wordsworth’s deep religion, was
to lead him, at last, to reach the point marked out for
him by God.

One might say that having now become so conscious
of the power of his own soul, he would naturally begin
to have interest in Man more than in Nature. LEvery-
thing that was then happening—the expectancy of the:
whole world, the sudden waking of the nations, the won-
derful emotion of mankind—was, one would think, caleu- |
lated to place Man first. But Wordsworth grew slowly; he
reached that point afterwards, but not now. Nature was
still predominant in his life. ‘‘ Among the more awful
scenes of the Alps,” he says, in one of his letters, “I had
not a thought of Man, my whole soul was turned to Him
Ln Wordsworth, 159

who produced the terrible majesty before me.” It was the
same in the peaceful beauty of the lakes. The happy,
glorious time, and the universal cry for liberty that
strengthened his interest in’ Man, were but an additional
gleam of sunshine which enhanced his sense of the
Beauty of the world. He was touched, ‘but with no
intimate concern.” He did not seem to need any human
joy, for
tin the ever-living Universe,

Turn where 1 might, was opening out its glorics,

And the independent spirit of pure youth

Called forth, at every season, new delights
Spread rcund my steps like sunshine o’er green fields,

This is the close of the carly education given him by
Nature. What had it done for him? It had made him
conscious of the might and dignity of his soul. It had
shaped the views and aspirations of his soul to majesty.
It had made him realize a Soul of beauty and enduring
life without himself, and he knew, from the power by
which it moved him, that that Soul was God. It had
awakened in him ideals of sublimity in which self was
lost, of calm and “ ennobling Harmony” in which moral
strength was gained, of tenderness in which joy and
hope were born; and the sublimity and calm and ten-
derness were God. It had so spoken to him that he had
separated himself for his work, and felt that he was a
dedicated Spirit, and the Power that had donc this
through Nature was God. He had secured in this way
a noble natural religion.

rBut Nature had not only educated his soul, it had also
done service to his intellect. In scanning the laws and
160 Theology in the English Poets.

watching the forms of Nature, by seeing things at first
hand, he had gained a standard for measuring the value
of things and thonghts; and he could now tell, as if by
intuition—what in books “ carried meaning to the natural
heart "—

What is passion, what is truth,
What reason, what simplicity and scnse.

Again, her order, which made itself felt within him, taught
him to reverence the abstract truths of Science and filled
them with the spirit of imagination. As he worked at
geometric Science, he was able to clothe the nakedness of
its austere truths with the hues and forms and with the
spirit of the forms of Nature. The same calm which was
impressed on him by Nature, in which he felt the in-
effable oneness of its life—a thought created by the calm
of Nature, and yet its source—he found again in the
permanent and universal sway of law, that type of the
supreine existence of God in whom all discords, un-
touched by passion, were harmonized and mingled.

The laws themselves were also made more interesting
hy being taken into the world of imagination. It did
no harm to his work in the sphere of Science, that when
away from it he clothed its laws with life, and asked, as
he wandered and wondered among the hills, how did it
happen that these great genii came to serve Man?

Again, as the solemn and simple aspects of Nature
gave grandeur to Man’s mind, and wrought to kindle and
exalt the soul,—so the changes of Nature, rapid and!
forceful, which told of life, were powerful to stir and
train the intellect :
Lin Werdsworth. 161

Like virtue have the forms
Perennial of the aucicnt hills ; nor less
The changeful language of their countenances
Quickens the slumbering mind, and aids the thoughts,
However multitudinous, to move
With order and relation,
Prelude, Bk, vii.

And now that imagination and intellect were awakened,
they.-cquld. not, rest. content. with... Nature..only, .or.,their
Om, I ork. ;..they, durned.to.secle their food in books. And
in this sphere also Nature intervened. He thanks God
that he was allowed to run wild, and saved by Nature from |
a forced and artificial education; that he was handed
over to the natural training of wild Nature and took
up things as the external world woke interest in them.
He lit by chance on books, and faéry tale and legend
seemed more in harmony with Nature than manuals of
science, She taught him not to lose her in over education,
so that at least in his case old Grandame Earth had not to
grieve that the

Playthings which her love designed for him

were unthought of, that the flowers and the river-sides
were neglected. The pupil of Nature, his was a larger,
grander teaching than that which merely trains the un-
derstanding. Books were good, he thought, yet how
much less good than that invisible lesson which comes to
us through the visible universe, even to the wild and care-
less child. But who gives that lesson, whose is the voice ,
that works so silently? In Wordsworth’s deep religion it
is God:

M
162 Theology mn the English Poets.

A gracious spirit o’er this earth presides,

And o’er the heart of man—invisibly

It comes—to works of unreproved deliyht,

And tendency benign, directing those

Who care not, know not, think not what they do.
Prelude, Bk, v.

And surely he is right. When we cram our children to
the throat with mere instruction, or make them move
over roads of learning like machines, we are really
shutting out from them God and God’s teaching; we
are forgetting the wisdom that is gained by freedom ;
we are killing originality and the poetic spirit. True
force and grandeur of character have their roots in carly
freedom to drink in other lessons than those that in-
structors give, and come in the child and man, as they
come in the forest tree :

Not by casting in a formal mould
But by its own divine vitality.

We have no necd to trouble ourselves to give so much to
our children, nor would we do so if we believed, as we
ought, that God is educating them Himself, that,
Jn the unreasoning progress of the world
| A wiser spirit is at work for us,
. A better cye than theirs, most prodigal
Of blessings, and most studious of our good

Even in what seem our most unfruitful hours,
Prelude, Bk. v.

And lastly, as Wordsworth passed from childhood into
youth, the books that most attracted him were naturally
the Poets; and Nature stepped in here also and gave hin
a deeper insight into them. Itis asplendid thought of his
when he describes how he, who had been intimate with
In Wordsworth. 163

Nature in his youth, sees something more in the work of the
great Masters of Song than mere glittering verse: he sees
in them great Nature herself. Their words are viewless
winds which visionary power attends; darkness and all
the host of shadowy things make their abode in their
poetry. In it, things, as in Nature, weave and unweave,
change in shadow and sunshine of thought. That is one
of the finest thoughts of Wordsworth, and the finest thing
ever said of poetry. But it was Nature who taught him
to feel and say it. It completes the history of this early
education of Nature, and I quote it in conclusion ;

Here must we pause: this only let me add,
From heart experience, and in humblest scnso
Of modesty, that he, who in his youth
A daily wanderer among woods and fields,
With living Nature hath been intimate,

Not only in that raw unpractised time

Is stirred to ecstacy, as others are,

By glittering verse; but further, doth receivo,

In measure only dealt out to himself,

Knowledge and increase of enduring joy

From the. great Nature that exists in works

Of mighty Poets. Visionary power

Attends the motions of the viewless winds,

Embodied in the mystery of words :

There, darkr.ess makes abode, and all the host

Of shadowy things work endless changes,—thcre,

As in a mansion like their proper home,

Even forms and substances are circumfused

By that transparent veil with light divine,

And, through the turnings intricate of verse,

Present themselves as objects recognised,

In flashes, and with glory not their own.
Prelude, Lk. ve

u 2
164 L. heology in the English Poets,

LECTURE VIII.

_—

I FINISHED in my last lecture our discussion of the
early education which Nature had given Wordsworth, and
traced its influence on his poctry of Nature. But Words-
worth was as much, if not more, the poet of Man as of
Nature, and the poetry of Man took in his hands as great
a development as the poetry of Nature. My task to-day
will be to show,—always taking the “ Prelude” as our
guide, —how the love of Man grew up in his soul.

I begin by a quotation from an Essay of Wordsworth’s,
in “The Friend,” which resumes a great part of that
which we have been saying in the two last lectures with
regard to the teaching of Nature,

**We have been discoursing of infancy, childhood,
boyhood, and youth, of pleasures lying in the unfolding
intellect plenteously as morning dewdrups, of knowledge
inhaled insensibly like a fragrance, of dispositions stealing
into the spirit like music from unknown quarters, of
images uncalled for arising up like exhalations, of hopes
plucked like beautiful wild flowers from the ruined tombs
that border the highways of antiquity, to make a garland
for a living forehead; in a word, we have been treating
In Wordsworth. 165

of Nature as a teacher of truth, through joy and through
gladness, and as a creatress of the faculties by a process
of smoothness and delight. We have made no mention of
fear, shame, sorrow, nor of ungovernable and vexing
thoughts ; because, although these have been, and have
done mighty service, they are overlooked in that stage of
life when youth is passing into manhood, overlooked or
forgotten. We now apply for succour which we need, to
a faculty which works after a different course; that faculty
is Reason; she gives much spontaneously, but she seeks
for more; she works by thought, through feeling ; yet in
thoughts she begins and ends.”

The way in which Nature works, then, is this: She
makes an impression on the poet’s mind, an impression
of calm, forexample. That after a time insensibly touches
his sympathies, and the thought of his father’s serene old
age or his child’s peaceful sleep is awakened in his heart ;.
and led on in this process of soothing thought now
quickened by human tenderness, he thinks of other things
that belong to the sphere of calm—of the quiet balance
of the powers of his own being, of the mighty rest of
God; and these in turn create the resolve to attain
calm of heart, to reach, through endeavour and watch-
fulness, the peace which passeth all understanding.
‘‘Thisis Nature,” as Wordsworth says, for I have used a
different illustration from that he uses, ‘ teaching seriously
and sweetly through the affections, melting the heart, and
through that instinct of tenderness, developing the
understanding.” i

“ Let, then, the youth go back, as occasion will permit, to
Nature and solitude, thus admonished by reason, and
166 Theology in the English Poets.

relying on this newly acquired support. A world of past
sensations will gradually open on him as his mind puts
off its infirmities : and he makes it his prime business to
understand himself. In such disposition let him return
to the visible universe and to conversation with ancient
books—and let him feed upon that beauty which unfolds
itself, not to his eye as he sees carelessly the things which
cannot possibly go unseen,—but to the thinking mind;
which searches, discovers, and treasures up, infusing by
meditation into the objects with which it converses an
intellectual life, whereby they remain planted in the
memory, now, and for ever.”

This was the point which Wordsworth had reached when
we lefthim. He had realized, through the affections which
Nature had awakened, his own Reason in its relation to
God and Nature, and he had felt the immense delight of
redoubling the charm and sublimity of Nature by throw-
ing upon it the force of his own mind. By this work the
interest of more than half of his life was concentrated
round the growth of his own being, and he studied him-
self with eagerness. But he did this in connection with
the influences of Nature upon him, not in connection with
the influences of Man. From these he was, at this
time, nearly altogether free, or at least, not consciously
influenced by them. Nature and God were first, Man
second.

But the transition from the contemplation of his own
being as aman to the contemplation of mankind itself
Was an casy one, and it now began to be made. His
residence in London, in the midst of this great hive of
workers, laid upon his soul the weight of humanity ; the
Ln Wordsworth. 167

residence in France which followed finished the work.
Man became the first, and Nature the second.

This was the great change, and he was bound to explain
it. It seemed sudden. Was it really so? And he looked
back on his life in order to answer the question. ‘To say
that it was sudden would have contradicted his philosophy.
For no one has seen more clearly than Wordsworth that
the operations of the soul are gradual, that ideas do not
spring to life at once, but grow, so that when they are
recognised as conscious possessions, we find that they
have been already for years developing themselves. We
recognise them when they flower, we are not conscious of
them in shoot, and stem, and leaves. But when they
have flowered, we can go back and trace their origin and
their growth. And Wordsworth now made it his business
to ask how this idea of Man as the centre of the universe
grew up in his mind; and to describe the religious aspect
it finally took.

Looking back, he sees that it began in his childhood,
and that just as interest in his own being was stirred
in him by the love of Nature, so in this case also, it
was the love of Nature which from the earliest times
led him onwards to the love of Man. His childhood
was passed among magnificent natural scenery, not so
enchanting as the Eastern Paradises which he describes,
but in this far lovelier that, unlike their gorgeous land-
scapes, its sun and sky and seasons found Man a worthy
fellow-labourer among them; free, working for himself,
led by all that surrounded him to individual and social
ends of his own frank choosing, and educated through the
simple gracious life of home. The men and mountains
168 Theology in the English Poets.

were at one in noble character. For the beauty of a
country is elevated by the freedom of its inhabitants.
No one can walk through Switzerland without feeling
that the long, almost unbroken liberty of soul which
marked her people, that the grave republicanism which
marks them now, add a new element of greatness to her
scenery. It is something to stand in the churchyard of
Altdorf, as I stood two years ago, and look up the lake
glittering blue in the morning light, and say to oneself,
“ this land has never been otherwise than free.” It made
wretched to many the loveliness of Italy, and Arnold
records the feeling in his letters, to think that man was
daily degraded there by a vile oppression; it adds a new
brightness now to her appealing Beauty to think that she
is mistress of herself. So to Wordsworth the meadows
beneath Helvellyn were lovelier far than the Paradise of
Gehol, because, in one, the freedom of Nature’s heart was
in harmony with human freedom, in the other, her freedom
was ceaselessly jarred by human slavery.

It was in this free pastoral life that the roots of Words-
worth’s love for Man struck deep. Shepherds were the
men who pleased him first, not the Arcadian shepherd,
nor such as Spenser fabled, but men “ intent on little
but substantial needs,”’ whose life was yet full of beauty
that the men had hearts to feel. In such a rude life imagi-
nation had much food from things connected with Man,
for there was continually presented to the child (however
unconscious of what he felt), the awful problem of the
seeming helpless subjection of mankind to the wild powers
of Nature. There was not a rock or stream or deep
valley in the hills which was not vocal, in the traditions
Ln Wordsworth. 169.

of the neighbourhood, with some tale of human suffering
or human daring. Wherever the boy roamed, Man and
his battle with Nature spoke to him. For here, where he
lived, it was no ‘smooth life’ the shepherd led, no
piping by rivulets among sunny meadows, but a toilsome
struggle for existence among hills where the snow buried
sheep and shepherd, and where the winds howled around
the companionless man who daily waited on the storms,
Wordsworth saw him frequently when
the lingering dews of morn

Smoke round him, as from hill to hill he hies,
His staff protending like a hunter’s spear :

And followed him in thought throughout the day, till he
felt

his presence in his own domain
As of a lord and master, or a power,
Or genius, under Nature, under God,
Presiding : and severest solitude
Had more commanding looks when he was there,

In certain aspects he became to the imagination like an
elemental genius, seen through the thick mist a giant
form stalking on the hill; or as he stepped from the
shadow of the rock, glorified ‘‘by the deep radiance
of the setting sun;”’ or descried in distant sky,

A solitary object and sublime,

Above all height! like an aerial cross
Stationed alone upon a spiry rock

Of the Chartreuse, for worship.*

* It is interesting to find the origin of this passage in the ‘‘ Prelude” in
Miss Wordsworth’s diary. She and her brother are walking to Tarbert
in mist and rain, and hear suddenly a loud hooting in the fields. ‘It
came from a little boy whom we could see on the hill between us and the
lake, wrapped up in grey plaid. He was probably calling home the cattle
170 Theolozy in the English Pocts,

In this way, man became ennobled outwardly before his
sight, his heart was introduced

To an unconscious love and reverence
Of Human Nature.

‘‘The sanctity of Nature was given to Man:” and yet

this creature so glorified by the imagination was a man
with the most common, a husband, father, one who
worked, rejoiced and suffercd; and there was as much
poetry in him, and his simple human relations, as there
was in his relations to the imaginative world of Nature.
It is one of Wordsworth’s poetic eustoms to see things
in the ideal and the real, and to make each make the
other poetical. He places the lark in a “ privacy of
glorious light,” but he brings him home at last to his
‘nest upon the dewy ground.” It is the very thing that
he always does for Man.

This was the first step whereby love of Nature led to
love of Man. To some it may seem far-fetched, but
Wordsworth blessed God that in his childhood he started
with faith in the nobleness of Man, that he began with
an ideal of human Nature. Were it otherwise, he says:

And we found evil fast as we find good
In our first years, or think that it is found,
How could the innocent heart bear wp and live!

for the night. His appearance was in the highest degree moving to the
imagination : mists were on the hill sides; darkness shutting iu upon the
huge avenue of mountains ; torrents roaring ; no home in sight to which
the child might belong; his dress, cry, and appearance, all different from
anythivg we had been accustomed to: it was a text, as William has
since observed to me, containing in itsclf the whole history of the high-
lander's life ; his melancholy, his simplicity, his poverty, his superstition,
and, above all, that visionariness which results from a communion with
the unworldlinesss of nature.”
Ln Wordsworth. ior

It was well for him that he first saw his race through
beautiful and noble objects, that he read the first
pages of the book of man through Nature. For he had
thus a safeguard against too rapid a disillusion of the
sanctities of faith in human Nature; he could resist

The weight of meanness, selfish cares,

Coarse manners, vulgar passions, that beat in
On all sides from the ordinary world.

His face was turned towards the truth that though Man
is base and sinful, yet that he is greater than his baseness
and his sin; that though at times we may despise him
as the slave of his meaner self, yet that we must reverénce
him as destined to triumph over it, and claim his inherit-
ance of Heaven. For true knowledge of human nature is
the product, first, of a lofty but undefined ideal of Man;
secondly, of that ideal disappointed ; and thirdly, of that
disappointment corrected by the calm judgment of a life
which has never let love go, nor faith ina God who is
the Father and the Saviour of men.

This was the root of Wordsworth’s love of Man. But
as we have seen, Nature was at first pre-eminent. Man
was only an “occasional delight, an accidental grace”
among the passion and the rapture in which Wordsworth
moved, inspired by the beauty of the world. As
he passed on from childhood and left its sports behind,
and began to directly commune with natural objects,
another step in this love of Man was made. When an
inner impulse first urged him to embody in words his feel-

‘ings, Fancy awoke and linked to Nature and her scenes
human sentiment and human pictures. He could not see
a grave without placing a widow there to weep; nor the
172 Theology in the English Poets.

fox-glove dismantled of its bells without thinking of a
vacrant mother whose children, careless of her sorrow,
played around her; nor arock, water-wet with springs and
sparkling in the sunshine without fancying it the silver
shicld of a knight hung over his tomb, or an entrance
into some fairy palace. Thus “ wilful and busy Fancy”

Engrafted far-fetched hopes on feelings bred
By pure imagination——turned
Instinctively to human passions.

And though Wordsworth did not understand the cause
of this, nor see that he was being slowly led towards that
which he calls the point

Of sound humanity to which our Tale
Leads, though by sinuous ways—

he had now arrived through these earlicr and later
impressions at a vacue ideal of Man, in which he. uncon-
sciously reverenced and loved him as sublime or good,
and threw around his vague ideal the brilliant or pensive
drapery of Romance. It was at this stage in his progress
that he went to Cambridge, and found in the university
life a point of transition between his early remoteness
from social life, and the great human disturbance into
which he was soon to plunge. It was, as he calls it,
something that resembled ‘an approach to human business,
a privileged world within a world, a midway residence
with all its intervenient imagery, that suited far better
his visionary mind than to be thrust out at once into the
conflicts of substantial life.” He saw in it an image of
the great world, and it touched him into that distant
In Wordsworth, 173

interest in humanity of which I have already spoken. But
it was not at Cambridge, but afterwards on his return to
the mountains that the interest took a conscious form.
The power and the life which lay in Man, ag the crown
of Nature, broke upon him at the very moment when
he became through Nature a dedicated spirit. You will
remember the passage already quoted, in which he describes
the deep religious impression made on him by an early
morning, his first clear realization of his mission in life,
In an after passage in the “ Prelude” he refers to the
intense emotion of that hour. We then find that he not
only realized himself, but also—in the excitement of
the hour, being uplifted by the strength of the emotions
that had wrought in him—rose into that conception of
Man, as an ideal Whole, which a boy often conceives from
history and poetry. Recall, he cries,

My song! those high emotions which thy voice
Has heretofore made knuwn ; that bursting forth
Of sympathy, inspiring and inspired,

When everywhere a vital pulse was felt,

And all the several frames of things, like stars
Through every magnitude distinguishable,
Shone mutually indebted, or half lost

Each in the other’s blaze, a galaxy

Of life and glory. In the midst stood Man,
Outwardly, inwardly contemplated,

As, of all visible natures, crown, thongh born
Of dust, and kindred to the worm; a Being
Both iu perception and discernment, first

In every capability of rapture,

Through the divine effect of power and love ;
As, more than anythiug we know, instinct
With Godhead, and, by reason and by will,
Acknowledging dependency sublime,

With the dream of this conception in his mind he went
174 Theology ti the English Poets.

for the second time to Cambridge, and there a more
practical contact with Man dispelled his ideal. Vice and
folly were thrust upon his view, and he lost much of his
early faith in human govdness: small characters, and
the little bustling passions and the isolated aims of
university life broke up the large impersonated idea of
Mankind. Yet the Ideal was not quite lost, for first,
Antiquity threw its solemn shadow over the present college
life, and filled it with the shapes of the great men of the
past, by whose life human nature was dignified; and
secondly, the very vice and folly he beheld showed how
lofty must be the nature which could fall solow. Nor
was it possible for him to think of human life in its
career to sorrow and guilt without a deeper and similar
sense of that old indefinite terror and dismay, which
once the storms and angry elements had wrought within
him. He began to see mankind as he had seen Nature.
Though then, the old imaginative ideal of simplicity and
joy in human life had passed away, yet, through this new
awfulness, another and a vaster thought of Man began to
grow, which took to itself from the terror in it a touch of
sublimity.

The journey to the continent, through France and
Italy trembling with the first revolutionary excitement,
added something to his interest in Man, and balanced,
by the passing joy which he felt in that glorious time,
the unhappy impression he had received at Cambridge.
But Nature was still ‘ sovereign in his mind” when he
arrived in London. There his ideal was further shattered.
The exposure of innocent life to shame, the degradation
of womanhood, the tragic suffcvrings of men, the vast
Lu Wordsworth, 175

follies, the triviality mixed with horror, the vulgar thought,
the mean interests, the sight of men unfaithful to their
work—these broke down the unsubstantial palace of his
ideal. But even as it was broken down, another building
began to be raised. At his very first entrance a truer,
loftier thought of Man arose—a tremendous sense of
power as belonging to mankind—

A weight of ages did at once descend

Upon my heart—no thought embodied, no
Distinct remembrances, but weight and power—
Power growing under weight.

The “endless stream of men and moving things,” the
everyday appearance of the mighty city, and its wonder
and awe, the “ quick dance of colours, lights and forms,”
all the multitude of hurrying men, with every character
of form and face, so that he could say, the face of every

one
That passes by me is a mystery ;

the sight of the great men who moved Mankind; the
orator, Burke, as he thundered against abstract rights ;
' the peace of the London night, when all was still, and
the business of the coming day was yet unborn; these
were the things which, in this “theatre and burial-place
of passions,” moved him to the heart with that passion of
the poet which answers ‘the appeal of mankind for his
interest and his love.

Daily and hourly, knowledge of man poured in upon him
from a multitude of scenes, and he found (to his delight
in the strength and glory of his youth) that he had power
to grasp the whole. It was less knowledge of particular
phases of human nature, than the impression of a vast
176 Theology in the English Poets.

spirit of humanity diffused through time and space,
which he gained. It was the sensu of all that had been
done and suffered, was doing and suffering now in the
great City and in the world, which brooded over him
like a vast shadow and filled his soul with thought. A
solemn, awful ideal of the majesty and power of
humanity now began to replace the vague ideal of his
boyhood, the shattered ideal of his youth. To him London
now was thronged; and the comparison is one of those
sublime flights of imagination of which Wordsworth alone
among modern poets has been capable:

With impregnations like the Wilds
In which my early feelings had been nursed—
Bare hills and valleys, full of caverns, rocks,
And audible seclusions, dashing lakes,
Echoes and waterfalls, and pointed crags
That into music touch the passing wind,

And the analogy which he felt is not obscure, for Nature,
like mankind, bears the traces of a suffering past. Every
rock-strewn valley tells of centuries of endurance and
agony from storm and frost and lightning, in the rent
channels of its streams and in the shivered peaks above it.
And if in the past Nature has suffered, there is no moment
of the present which does not tell of its intense activity ;
we cannot linger by the sea or in the woods, withont an
impression, almost irritating, of unmitigated work and
waste and reproduction. The same feelings as these were
Wordsworth’s in the city, when he passed through the
forest, and wandered by the ocean, of humanity.

And as he had received higher ideas of God in spite of
Nature, “red in tooth and claw,” and scen love under-
In Wordsworth. Cyy

neath its awful forces and the apparent ruin that they
worked ; so in the city, owing to this early training, he
was able, in spite of misery and guilt, to grasp the higher
view of mankind, and to love mankind. He dwelt upon
the real, but it led him to a new ideal. He saw what
Man was, went down into the depths of his vice and guilt,
and yet his trust in that which mankind might become
was not overthrown. And when he turned from the
darker to the lighter side, he saw that the Divine in
Man was still Divine, nay, more beautiful even from the
gloom through which it flashed to speak of Heaven in
the hearts of men.

One more sublime idea came upon him and exalted the
thought of Man. It was the idea of his unity. There
was one Brotherhood held in one Father,—

One Spirit, over ignorance and vice
Predominant, in good and evil hearts :

one conscience shared by all alike, ‘as one eye for the sun’s
light.” In this idea, among all the confusion of men, and
whirl of good and ill, Wordsworth found rest, and in the
rest and the blessedness of it, he found God, and saw
Him as the Master of mankind. He had reached the
third stage in our thought of Man of which I spoke,
when the disappointment we suffer from the overthrow
of our youthful ideal of Man is accepted and corrected.
Thus from his boyhood, his thoughts,—
by slow gradations had been drawn

To human-kind and to the good and ill
Of human life——.

Nature had led him on; through her he had found the
N

 
178 Theology in the English Poets.

love of his race. But still, though the love of Man was
growing day by day, it had not as yet reached that point
at which it became predominant. He still was able to
fly from humanity to her, to find refuge in her mighty
calm from the guilt and anarchy of men.

The world of human-kind outweighed not hers
In my habitual thoughts ; the scale of love
Though filling daily, still was light, compared
With that in which hex mighty objects lay.

And for a short period in this year, 1791, he went to
Wales and revived and sanctified his soul by communion
with the hills. But the enthusiasm of Humanity, once
awakened, is not a passion that goes to sleep again, and
now the songs of liberty and the glory of the efforts
France was making rang with a more alluring murmur
in his ear. He was irresistibly drawn to the theatre of
the Revolution, where the great, questions which most
deeply move the race and all their passions, were play-
ing the first act in that mighty drama in whose
development we are now involved. To this, and the
questions it involves, [ shall devote my next lecture.
Ln Wordsworth, 179

LECTURE IX.

pas,

Art the beginning of these Lectures, we traced that which
is called the Poetry of Man from Pope to the close of
the life of Cowper. We found in his poetry a number
of new ideas on the subject of mankind, the main charac-
teristic of which was, that they all rested on the thought
of an universal mankind, which in itself supposed the
equality of all men in certain realms of thought and act.
The ideas were new and revolutionary, but in Cowper
they took no clear form. They floated in solution, they
were not crystallized; they were the product of insensible
not recognised influences of the time; mere green shoots
of things which were to become mighty trees; the sub-
stance in faith of things hoped for, the evidence of things
not seen; sparks of a kindling fire scattered only here
and there, but full of a life whose first property was the
will and the power to devour things too old and too cor-
rupt to live. No one suspected then that they would burst
into flame with such accumulating rapidity; but a few
years only had passed by when they rose into a conflagra-
tion which, in the French Revolution, ran over the Euro-
pean world. In England the fire did not fall upon the

State, but its inspiration, and the passionate emotion which
N 2
180 Theology in the English Poets.

attended it, fell upon the poets; and out of the hearts of
Coleridge and Wordsworth the poetry of universal Man,
of freedom, of equal rights, of infinite promise, of the
overthrow of tyranny, leaped full-grown into a manhood
which has never endured decay. It is the history of its
influence on Wordsworth’s mind which we have now to
trace and to explain.

We have seen that this development of the poetry of
Man in Wordsworth was preceded by that of the poetry of
Nature. I have worked out that in the previous lectures,
and an astonishing growth it is—so astonishing in com-
parison with the work on the same subject done by Cowper,
Crabbe, and Burns, that it seems, at first sight, inex-
plicable. But the first explanation of its rapidity is
one already alluded to in the history of the growth of the
poetry of natural description. It was in reality no
swift creation, but the flowering of a plant that had
already clothed itself with leaves and had nothing more
to do but flower. It is true that the whole plant was
covered almost in an instant with a mass of flowers,
and their extraordinary richness of flowerage needs a
further explanation. It is supplied when we realize
that the long European movement which so suddenly
took form in the French Revolution had reached in
Wordsworth’s early life that point of expansion which
only needs a touch to cause the outburst. For at such a
time there is that profound but latent excitement in
which the minds of the Poets, who are the first to feel
excitements, become swiftly creative on all subjects within
their range; when the work of a century is often done in
a year. Supply a new and quickening clement to the soil
Ln Wordsworth. 181

of the Poet’s thought, let the air which it breathes become
nipping and eager, and things which have only been in
leaf within him, will cover their every spray with flowers.
One more explanation of this apparent rapidity is that
the revolutionary movement contained within it a particular
excitement on the subject of Nature. It took form in
France in Rousseau’s love of wild nature, in his thought
that Nature was wiser, simpler, and greater than Man;
but in him it was mixed with the ugliest imposition of
his own diseased feelings on Nature. It took form in
Germany in the songs of the young Poets who stormed
and raged in verse till Goethe, who had himself in his
youthful time out-thundered the others, raised his tran-
quillizing head above the waves. It had been growing
into form for the last hundred years in England; and
we find that, partly influenced by Rousseau, it preferred,
shortly before Cowper, the wild and lonely landscape in
which men could feel sentimental; next, it preferred the
wilder and lonelier scenes for their ownsake, and having
felt them profoundly, it then became connected with the
poetry of Man. The Poets transferred their love of this
wild nature to the men who lived in ‘it, and looked
on them as certain to be nobler and more independent
than they could be in cities and the artificial world. It
was there we ought to seek for the primeval and pure
feelings of men; and Wordsworth, in the love which he
bore to the shepherds, and the honour he paid to his own
dalesmen, was following up to its legitimate conclusion
that excitement on the subject of wild nature which was
now one of the elements of the European disturbance.
We have thus been led, in thinking of the revolutionary
182 Theology in the English Poets.

movement as it bore on the idea of Nature, to the very
point at which we left Wordsworth in the last lecture,
when he had been led by the love of Nature to the love
of Man. He had arrived, in solitude, and following his
natural individuality, at the same point to which the
world was being led by its new impulse, but the impulse
had of course its insensible influence upon him. He
was now fitted to become a part of it, and to con-
sciously join in it. He had been led by the love of Nature
to the love of the simple men among whom he lived.
Passing into the world and mingling with men, he carried
with him the teaching of Nature, and applied it to his
conception of mankind. The self-investigation that
Nature had forced upon him; the sense of the pre-
eminent dignity of the human soul that he had learnt
from her; and the previous conception he had formed of
Nature as One, led him to investigate human nature,
to recognize then its pre-eminent dignity, and finally to
see mankind as One Being whose life and rights and
powers and place in the world, whose origin and whose
destiny he was above all bound to study. The revo-
lutionary idea 6f one universal humanity began to germi-
natein hismind. A multitude of vague, formless thoughts
on this subject were floating in the air. He breathed
them, but as yet neither he nor anyone had been able to
realize them, for they were not made clear by being arranged
under a few leading thoughts.

It was this which the French Revolution did for him
and for the world, It gave sudden, clear, and terrible
form to the long-prepared ideas of Europe; it placed the
movement in which all had been sharing on lines on
[nu Wordsworth, 183

which it could run along to a known end. It did the
work of the Prophet for the world; it gave voice to the
voiceless passion of a million hearts. It said, Man is
one and indivisible, and it attempted to carry out that
idea and all its resulting thoughts in politics and society.
How far it had anything to do with Christianity, and how
it influenced Wordsworth, is the subject of my lecture.

It did not, as I have hinted, come on Wordsworth unpre-
pared. He was himself a natural republican. He had been
born in a poor district, in a primitive homely corner of
English ground, and he had rarely seen, during his school-
day time the “face of one vested with respect through
claims of wealth or blood ;”? and when he passed to the
University it was, he says, one of its benefits, that it
held up to his view something of a Republic. All stood
there on equal ground, men were brothers there in honour;
distinction lay open to all alike, and wealth and title were
less than industry and genius. Moreover, he had learnt
obedience to the presence of God’s power in the sovereignty
of nature ; and again, fellowship with venerable books had
sanctioned—

the proud workings of the soul
And mountain liberty.

It could not be, h: says,—

But that one tutored thus should look with awe
Upon the faculties of man, receive

Gladly the highest promises, and hail

As best, the government of equal rights

And individual worth.

And to this natural republicanism he traces his first
indifference on the outbreak of the Revolution. It did
184 Theology in the English Poets.

not seem so wonderful to him as the rest; for he had
breathed unconsciously its air from the beginning. He
was scarcely dipped at first, he says, into the turmoil, and
the result was that he then possessed a sounder judgment
than those who lived in the full rush of the excitement.
Even afterwards when, having fully shared in the excite-
ment, his mind subsided, he recovered quickly the cooler
judgment he had possessed; and for a long time, when
other men in England despaired, retained his faith in
freedom in spite of the Terror. He had never been swept
upwards on the shore so violently as others ; he never was
swept back so far as others in the reflux of the wave.

At the same time, and this is important for the com-
prehension of Wordsworth, there was a distant conser-
vatism in his nature, that which belongs to the Artist and
Poet who love the past for its romance, or for the
nobleness it once possessed. In the very midst of earnest
dialogues with Beaupuis in the forests of the Loire, his
imagination carried him away from the turbulent present ;
and he saw the woods full of the forms of old Romance,
that Romance the Revolution was destroying. Nor could
he be unmoved when things, which had sacred or chivalrous
associations growing round them like ivy round a ruin, were
desecrated by the destroying element in the Revolution.
Hence arose a conflict in his mind between delight in
new-born freedom and its overthrow of corrupt states, and
his sorrow for the many things which, once the origin of
high emotions, went down in the same shipwreck. But
the conflict itself was productive of that mental and
imaginative excitement in which fine poetic work is done;
and the slight tinge of conservatism acted as a kind of
In Wordsworth, 185

sobering restraint on the imagination, so that his sanity
as a Poet of Man was preserved in a time of furious
excitement. And again, the imaginative work his poetic
temper wrought around the old things of the past—a con-
vent, a chdteau, a hermitage—served also to balance the
revolutionary passion.

Imagination, potent to inflame

At times with virtuous wrath and noble scorn,

Did also often mitigate the force

Of civic prejudice, the bigotry,

So call it, of a youthful patriot’s mind ;

And on these spots with many gleams I looked

Of chivalrous delight.

But these feelings were only slight weights in the oppo-
site scale, His hatred of absolute rule, and of the barren
pride and oppression of the xoblesse, and his longing for
the redemption of the people at almost any cost, grew till
they outweighed everything else, and in the first half of
his artist-life his republican ideas were always predomi-
nant. Living in these ideas, and in the excitement of that
contest in his own mind which I have pointed out, his
work was marked by a wonderful freshness and life. In
the second half, the contest ceased—he was shocked
back into conservatism; the little germ of it in him
grew into an overshadowing tree under whose shade ideas
died. Maxims and formulas replaced them, and, being
essentially unpoetical, they all but killed his poetic
nature. With the passing away of his revolutionary
ideas, passed away the divine spirit of song, the strength
of his thought, the majesty of his style, the emotion
which thrilled through his verse and gave the kindling
impulse to his style. He became pedestrian and con-
186 Theology in the Lnglish Poets.

templative, and we can no longer say of him, that he
spoke “non verba, sed tonitrua.”’

Nor is it difficult to account for this. The Poet who is
now to say great things of Nature or of Man, who is to be
more than the mere describer of Nature, or the mere
analyzer of human nature, produces nothing worthy, if
he be not at heart influenced by the larger republican
ideas.

To one holding no longer the great ideas, and feeling
no longer the passions embodied in the words, Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity, Nature could not speak as she did
of old. For she is, to her core, republican. It is by the
consent of all, and by its full value being given to the
work of each, that her great community exists and moves
and grows. Tach thing, bird, and brook, and tree, sings
and flows and clothes itself with its own beauty, by its
own divine vitality, and at its own sweet will; all have
equal rights in sun and earth, in rain and dew ; all choose
freely the dwelling-place most fitted for their self-develop-
ment, and no one says them nay; and the seeming viola-
tions of this are nothing as against the rule, and indeed
belong to the rule. All are brothers one of another and
live and die for one another, and those things which have
the mastery, like the sun, have it because they give away
their life to others. They rule because they are the best
givers.

And she deals with us with the same republicanism.
We turn from the oppression of the world, from the
selfishness of caste, and the exclusiveness of wealth to
the blessed equalities of Nature; and find comfort in the
knowledge that sunlight and rain fall as richly on the
Iu Wordsworth. 187

poor as on the wealthy, that her beauty is poured out on
all, that she does not reserve the glory of the sunrise for
the cultivated classes, nor the freshness of the dew for the
nobility. It was this spirit of freedom, of the brotherhood
of universal love, of unlimited life and beauty bestowed
on all, contradicting by silent and hourly act the theories
of the Tory, which strove in vain in later years to recover
its early power over Wordsworth. He could not receive
its teaching, and his poetry of Nature decayed as his life
decayed.

As to the poetry of Man, it suffered still more. For in
what high vein can he write, in whom the spirit of pro-
phecy is replaced by the spirit of mere teaching, infinite
hope for Man by melancholy moaning over his fate;
belief in the future by belief in the past. These are not
the things which kindle the life of Song, but depress
it; they throw no consecrating light, but gloom, upon the
landscape of Man; the sorrow born of them does not
humanize the soul, but shuts it up within itself—and
Wordsworth’s verse suffered from their presence in his
mind. He ceased to give voice to the deepest longings
and hopes of men who cared for Man; and the Poet
loses the very breath and impulse of song when men,
listening to his words, no longer send back to him a wave
of sympathy and joy.

It is most pitiful when the Poet, whose highest
business is to hope and prophesy for Man, gives himself
up to the melancholy pipe, and hymns only his own
sorrow and the sorrow of the race by the riverside of time,
as some of our modern poets do. There is no enduring
life in such poetry, and so far as Wordsworth fell into
188 Theology in the English Poets,

despair of the Present and regret of the Past, his poetry
lost its power and its life. He was saved from the worst
form of this evil by that calmer judgment of which I spoke,
which enabled him to resist the full force of the shock he
received; but he was chiefly saved by his Christianity,
for in the belief in a redeeming God and in a divine
future he could still abide in hope, and live in faith
of a diviner freedom, for the race. But he was only
partly saved, for in rejecting the primary thoughts of the
Revolution he rejected half the ideas of Christianity. If
Christianity has any politics, they are democratic. It is
very well to say that it has been the servant of tyrants
over the body and the soul, because it has been made such
by priests and kings. But the reason is not far to seek.
They saw that it was the most dangerous element in the
world for them and their power, and their one effort has
been to prove that it was upon their side. But they
could not do this without denying or travestying its
primal ideas, and this they set themselves to do. They
took out of it its universality, its love, its socialism; its
proclamation of spiritual equality and of equal rights and
duties before God; its contempt for wealth, its hatred
of oppressors; its love for the poor, the ignorant, and
the low-born. And they made an aristocratic, exclusive,
oppressing phantom of it, and said to the world, believe
in this, or you are lost for ever. And men not only
believed in it, but believed that it was Christianity. It
followed that when the thoughts of the Revolution swept
away the political and ecclesiastical Christianity, men
cried out that Christianity itself was dead and buried
for ever. But it was not so. It rose again into a new
Ln Wordsworth. 189

life; it found its true home among the new ideas; it
showed, as it grew, that it was not that thing which
men had long believed it to be; but the supporter of
freedom, of equality, of brotherhood, the most real force
in this world against tyranny and superstition, the
asserter, nay, the creator of the idea of an universal
humanity, and of all the thoughts which are the children
of that idea and of that of an universal Father. It is one
of the most distinctive marks of Christianity that it has
never failed to commend itself—not as a dogmatic system,
but as a spirit which influences by great thoughts and stirs
deep emotions—to free states. It is equally characteristic
of it when it has been degraded by despots into a poli-
tical engine, and treated by the people as such, to
rise out of its degradation and overcome the popular
hatred, and re-assert itself, undecayed, and with fresh
hopes in its eyes, as the religion of Democracy. Even in
France this was the case; in proportion as the political
work of the Revolution grew firm, its irreligious work
decayed. The Christian Church found its life renewed
in republicanism ; and if France is now un-Christian,
that is not due to republicanism, but to the ceaseless
despotism which, prevailing under various forms to the
present hour in France, has again undone the religious
work of the Revolution, and again travestied Christianity,
so that men must hate it as an enemy.

If there is one thing which above all we need now, it is
that there should be some who should boldly say that a
Christianity which denies the root thoughts of the Revo-
lution is not Christianity-at all, but an odious idol which
takes its name. Only we must also say that Christianity
190 Theology in the English Poets.

is more than these thoughts; that it takes in, for example,
not only the rights of men, but as Mazzini said, hitting
fairly the great omission of the Revolution, the duties of
mien as the masters and the limits of their rights. With
this addition—it being understood that I speak here of
Christianity in its relation to the whole of mankind as a
social Being, not in its relation to personal feelings and
wants, which forms a separate study,—the leading ideas
of Christianity are the same as the leading ideas of the
Revolution, only in the one case they are applied in
the religious, in the other in the political sphere: or, to
express it otherwise, the revolutionary ideas are the
Christian ideas applied to the relation of men to one
another, and to the state.

But we must look further into this thought, for it
enables us at once to show the theology that naturally
belongs to Wordsworth’s poetry of Man. “The Revo-
lution,” says De Tocqueville, “had no peculiar terri-
tory, it was not made for France alone, but for the
world, and its result was in some sort to blot out of the
map all the ancient frontiers. In spite of laws, traditions,
character, and language, it brought men together on a
common ground, changed enemies into compatriots, and
formed above national peculiarities an intellectual country
common to all, of which all men of all nations could
become citizens.” That is as true of Christianity as of
the Revolution, if we change the word intellectual into
spiritual; because both started from the one idea of
a common humanity which made all men brothers, and
therefore claimed for all men equal rights to freedom,
to svlf-development, and to the enjoyment of the common
In Wordsworth. Igt

gifts of the earth and sky. Both Christianity and the
Revolution built their foundation on Human Nature
itself.

“Jt brought together,” De Tocqueville continues,
“nations which scarcely knew one another, and united
them by interests common to the race. It was disen-
gaged from every special bond to a people or a form
of government, or a society, or an epoch, or a race;
it had no particular national end, no special French aim :
its end was the general rights and duties of all men in
political and social matters.” That also was as true of
Christianity as of the Revolution, if we leave out political
matters with which Christianity did not directly meddle;
and it is true of both, because they started alike from
the one great thought, that there was only one nation,
the nation of mankind, and that all its citizens were
bound to sacrifice themselves for one another. In Christ,
there is neither Jew nor Greek, German, French or Eng-
lishman, but the one universal humanity which is all,
and in all, and in which all men are one, equal, free,
and brothers.

The ideas are the same in both, and whether politically,
socially, or spiritually applied, they are Christian ideas.
The difference lies in this, that the ideas of the Revolu-
tion were applied only to Man as Man, the Christian ideas
sought for a higher unity than the mere basis of acommon
humanity. They found it in the common Fatherhood of
God and in the union of all men in the humanity of
Christ; and until the ideas of the Revolution, as they
have sometimes done, complete themselves in those two.
higher thoughts, they will fail to do their work. They
192 Theology in the English Poets.

cannot conquer of themselves that selfishness in man
which supports exclusiveness, ensures oppression, and
hates the freedom which equalizes men. They cannot
prevent revolution from ending in despotism.

Naturally, along with these great thoughts of an uni-
versal mankind, of natural equality, of the brotherhood
of the race, were two other lines of thought—one which
went forward with passion to overthrow all institutions
which repressed the growth of Man or kept him in any
slavery; another which went forward with equal passion
to prophesy a glorious future for mankind—and in both
these lines of thought, Christianity and the Revolution
were at one. They were both the work of God in the
hearts of men, and they both became leading poetical
ideas in the new poetry of Man in England.

These were the principles of the Revolution, and the
great religious English Poet took them up and supple-
mented them at once with their analogous Christian
ideas. Wordsworth could not help it; he did it almost
unconsciously. He found the doctrine of an universal
Man and an universal brotherhood in the doctrine of an
universal Father. He saw in God the source of the
rights of men to equality and liberty. It was God who
was the avenger of slavery, the vindicator of man against
the evils of caste, of enforced ignorance, poverty, and
despotism over the bodics or souls of men; and he looked
forward through God, because He was eternal Justice
and Love watching over Man, to a glorious time of
universal joy and mutual love, when the race should be
regenerated. It was he who made the poetry of Man in
Eugland not only revolutionary but theological,
In Wordsworth. 193

It was thus the Revolution came on the hearts of
young and imaginative and religious men in England.
But we, who live upon the broad river of its thought,
can scarcely realize what it was to men when first it
broke, a living fount of streams, from its rock in the
desert, to quench the thirst of those who longed, but
knew not, till it came, for what they longed. We who
live in times which, though not dull, are sad coloured,
can scarcely imagine the glory of that awaking, the
stream of new thoughts that transfigured life, the pas-
sionate emotion, the love and hatred, the horror and
the rapture, the visionary glories, the unutterable hopes,
the sense of deliverance, the new Heavens and the new
Earth, brimful of promise, which dawned on men :

Before them shone a glorious world
Fresh as a banner bright, unfurled
To music suddenly.

In that early morning of hope, the love of liberty seized
on men with a power, almost a violence, which pro-
phesied a reaction, and forced itself forth in the young
in violent poetry. I have already spoken of the uncon-
trolled and tempestuous verse of Coleridge on this subject.
In his view also it was God who had awakened liberty.
Freedom in France

From the Almighty’s bosom leapt
With whirlwind arm, fierce minister of love,

Southey, and Lloyd felt the same; vague expectations,
wild schemes, flitted through their minds; they projected
a socialist communion on the Susquehanna to which they

gave the name of the Pantisocracy, where all things were
°
194 Theology in the English Poets.

to be in common, and the “cluster of families, bound
together by congenial tastes and uniform forms rather
than in self-depending and insulated households,” were
to solicit their food from daily toil, a thing which De
Quincey says might have been fortunate for Coleridge.
But none felt the enthusiasm of the time more intensely,
nor expressed it more nobly than Wordsworth. He was
the true human Poet of the time. He felt every pulse of
the movement in his own heart, and responding to that
he felt—

From hour to hour the antiquated earth
Beat like the heart of man.

He describes its effect in the Excursion on a sorrow-
stricken, lonely man. He was roused from his grief by
the crash of the Bastille, and from the wreck rose a
golden palace, as it seemed, of equitable law and mild
paternal sway.

The potent shock
I felt: the transformation I perceived,
As marvellously seized as in that moment
When, from the blind mist issuing, 1 beheld
Glory—beyond all glory ever seen,
Confusion infinite of heaven and earth,
Dazzling the soul. Meanwhile, prophetic harps
In every grove were ringing, ‘ War shall cease ;
Did ye not hear that conquest is abjured?
Bring garlands, bring forth choicest flowers, to deck
The tree of Liberty..—-My heart rebounded ;
My melancholy voice the chorus joined ;
~—-‘ Be joyful all ye nations ; in all lands,
Ye that are capable of joy be glad!
Henceforth whate’er is wanting to yourselves
In others ye shall promptly find—and all
Enriched by mutual and reflected wealth
Shall with one heart, honour their common kind.
In Wordsworth. 195

He was reconverted to the world in the general joy. He
haunted all assemblies where busy men, inspired with
universal hope, met to unite nations. In the victory of
mankind over wrong, he found his faith in God again.
He returned to public worship, and felt a new meaning in
the Hebrew Prophets when they thundered against op-
pression, when they foretold a reign of peace.

Nor when Wordsworth describes its effect upon himself
is he less enthusiastic—

O pleasant exercise of hope and joy!

For mighty were the auxiliars that then stood

Upon our side, we who were strong in lovo !

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven !—Oh ! times

In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways

Of custom, law, and statute, took at once

The attractiou of a country in romance !

‘When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights,

-When most intent on making of herself

A prime Enchantress—to assist the work

Which then was going forward in her name !

Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth,

The beauty wore of promise, that which sets

(As at some moment might not be unfelt

Among the bowers of paradise itself)

The budding rose above the rose full blown,

What temper at the prospect did not wake

To happiness unthought of? The inert

Were roused, and lively natures rapt away !

They who had fed their childhood upon dreams,

The playfellows of fancy, who had made

All powers of swiftness, subtlety, and strength

Their ministers,—who in lordly wise had stirred

Among the grandest objects of the sense,

And dealt with whatsoever they found there

As if they had within some lurking right

To wield it ;—they, too, who, of gentle mood

Had watched all gentle motions, and to these

Had fitted their own thoughts, schemers more mild,
°
196 Theology in the English Poets.

And in the region of their peaceful selves ;—
Now was it that both found, the meek and lofty
Did both find, helpers to their heart’s desire,
And stuff at hand, plastic as they could wish :
Were called upon to exercise their skill,

Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,

Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where !
But in the very world which is the world

Of all of us,—the place where in the end

We find our happiness, or not at all!

That was written in 1805 as he looked back on all he
had felt, and the enthusiasm of the time is not dead in
its noble verse. It was a dream, but it is a dream which
hour by hour is fulfilling itself; and dream or not, it
did a mighty work on Wordsworth. It built him into a
man; it added the enthusiasm of Man to the enthu-
siasm of Nature; it took him away from contemplation
of his own soul to live in the hopes, to proclaim the
faith, to seek the love of mankind; it gave him the
impulse to write some work, which should give form to
the faith he now possessed in the glory of the future,
and in the majesty of the powers, of Man. It led him
all his life long—even when his Conservatism got the
upper hand,—to be the champion of liberty, the hater
of oppression in the present—however in his imaginative
Toryism he might glorify the past. It made him the
singer of simple life, of honest manners, of poverty and
its sorrows, of the honour of humanity in all ranks—it
taught him to see the face of God in every man,

It gave, De Quincey says, “ to the whole system of
his own thoughts and feelings a firmer tone, and a sense
of the awful realities which surround the mind,” of the
awful sorrows and guilt and the still more awful goodness
In Wordsworth. 197

which belong to Man in times of profound emotion, and
underlie his nature always. And in this new and lurid
but absorbing light, the passion for Nature was quenched.
It reawoke afterwards, and how, we shall hereafter see ;
but at present, the destiny of Man, his origin, his duties,
his rights, his possibilities, the agony of his battle,
and the God with him—these were all in all to Words-
worth. He saw through a glass darkly, he only knew in
part, but he had put away childish things for ever. He
had entered on the dignity and sincere thinking of matured
manhood, He was now trained not only to be the revealer
of Nature, but also the Poct of Man,
198 Theology in the English Poets,

LECTURE X.

—1—

Tar Revolution with which Wordsworth came into
contact in France, made a revolution in his mind. It
carried him forward from a life with Nature to a life
with Man. I discussed last Sunday some of the ideas
that seized on him, and I traced their relation to the-
ology, and their effect on Wordsworth. I propose to-day
to continue the subject, and to connect what is to be said,
partly with Wordsworth’s life in France during 1791—92,
and partly with his poetry.

We have seen that in 1789 the influence of Nature
was predominant; but after his stay in London, where he
was brought into closer contact with mankind in mass,
the revolutionary movement sucked him into its whirl-
pool with amazing force, and shortly after Louis XVI.
had taken the oath of fidelity to the new Constitution,
he went to France to find the whole nation mad with
joy. At first his ardour for freedom was more a sen-
timent than one of those profound convictions which
create an enduring passion. In the guise of an enthusiast,
he made a relic of a stone picked up where the Bastille
had stood; but things of this kind seemed to touch him
less than the sentimental paintings in the Louvre. He
In Wordsworth. 199

was not as yet conscious of the power which had begun to
move within him. But, passing on to live in Orleans, the
passion of the time soon developed it. On his arrival,
he haunted society where politics were tabooed; but he
was soon wearied, and withdrew to a noisier world.

At first he associated chiefly with the officers stationed.
in the city, who were bent on restoring the old régime,
their only wish being to undo that which had been
done. One among them, however, who became his special
friend, was of a different type, and his case is important
as illustrating how the awful temper of the time mastered
men who would otherwise have been frivolous. He had
been a noted gallant, but now—in the conflict which
raged within him between old feelings, traditions of
caste and honotr, and the new ideas and the revelation
of the wrongs of mankind—his person, spirit and cha-
racter changed. He was like a man ravaged by inward
pain. With every post from Paris,—

the fever came,

A punctual visitant, to shake this man,

Disarmed his voice and fanned his yellow cheek

Into a thousand colours ; while he read,

Or mused, his sword was haunted by his touch

Continually, like an uneasy place

In his own body.
Such agitation in others soon awoke the same in Words-
worth. Indeed none could long remain at peace, for

The soil of common life was, at that time

Too hot to tread upon. . . .
The land all swarmed with posaitin, like a plain
Devoured by locusts.

Small men, unheard of now, became for the time powers ;
200 Theology tn the English Poets.

the fire ran from Paris to the provincial towns, and from
them to the remotest nook and village of the land; and
Wordsworth, resisting the arguments of those who sup-
ported the past, threw himself into the arms of the
republicans.

Became a patriot, and my heart was all
Given to the people, and my love was theirs.

He and his friend Beaupuis, who was rejected with
hatred by his brother officers, lived almost together.
Both were enthusiastic, both were full of hope, and the
description which Wordsworth gives of him is in itself so
beautiful, and illustrates so well the best type of the
men of the earliest times of the revolution, that I cannot
refrain from quoting it,—

A meeker man

Than this lived never, nor a more benign,
Meek though enthusiastic. Injuries
. Made Aim more gracious, and his nature then
Did breathe its sweetness out most sensibly,
As aromatic flowers on Alpine turf,

When foot hath crushed them. He through the events
Of that great change wandered in perfect faith,
As through a book, an old romance, or tale

Of Faery, or some dream of actions wrought
Behind the summer clouds. By birth he ranked
With the most noble, but unto the poor
Among mankind he was in service bound,

As by some tie invisible, oaths professed

To a religious order. Man he loved

As man ; and, to the mean and the obscure,
And all the homely in their homely works,
Transferred a courtesy which had no air

Of condescension ; but did rather seem

A passion and a gallantry, like that

Which he, a soldier, iu his idler day

Had paid to woman: somewhat vain he was,
Ln Wordsworth, 201

Or seemed so, yet it was not vanity,

But fondness, and a kind of radiant joy
Diffused around him, while he was intent
On works of love or freedom, or revolved
Complacently the progress of a cause
Whereof he was a part: yet this was meek
And placid, and took nothing from the man
That was delightful.

They talked together, while France stood on the brink of
its great trial, of Man and his noble nature, as it was in
itself; of the abstract political theories founded on the
conception of an universal mankind; and of the oppression
and tyranny that had for centuries hindered Man’s deve-
lopment. On these three lines of thought I shall build
what I have to say in this lecture and the following one.

I. And first with regard to Man, Wordsworth ap-
proached, he tells us, the shield

Of human nature from the golden side,

and would have fought even to the death to attest that it
was gold. And charmed with the golden view, he was led
to ponder, first on the individual man, on what was best
in him—

Wise in passion and sublime in power,

Benevolent in small societies

And great in large ones.
And he did this, stripping him of all adventitious
ornaments, of rank and wealth, and traditional honours—
looking at him as he was in himself, not as he was by
that which he possessed. This habit which had grown
upon him among the hills, but which he did not then con-
sciously possess, became now the conscious habit of his
life, and to express its results one of the principal objects
of his poetry.
202 Theology in the English Poets.

It was rooted in him by that which he saw at this
time in France, when the whole nation sprang as it were
into new being. Heand Beaupuis rejoiced together, when
after long conversations on “the honourable deeds and
noble spirits of ancient story,” on the rise of sects and
nations, and the natural union of men under the influence
of forming ideas—they turned to the movement going on
around them, and beheld, responding to the aspirations of
their own minds—

A living confirmation of the whole

Before us, in a people from the depth

Of shameful imbecility uprisen, ~

Fresh as the morning star. Elate we looked

Upon their virtues ; saw, in rudest men,

Self-sacrifice the firmest ; generous love,

And continence of mind, and sense of right,

Uppermost in the midst of fiercest strife.
It was this that he carried back to England with him
and wrought into his poetry. He moved among men,
he says, with genial feelings; when erring, erring in the
better part, and in the kinder spirit; indulgent to their
weakness, rejoicing in their goodness; as much a child of
Nature as before, only now giving to Man a stronger
affection than he gave to Nature,

Diffusing only those affections wider

That from the cradle had grown up with mo,
And losing, in no other way than light

Ts lost in light, the weak in the more strong,

Trusting in the grandeur of the one human heart that he
had learnt in France belonged to all, he made it his main
subject, but he turned from it as seen in cities to its more
natural aspects among. the poor. He was the first im
England—not excepting Crabbe, whose sternness, even'
In Wordsworth. 203

whose cynicism of portraiture, leaves too little of that
tenderness and pity, or of that reverence for the men which
is necessary for poetic treatment of the poor—he was the
first who threw around the lives of ordinary men the glory
and sweetness ofsong. He was the first who poured around
the dalesmen’s cottages, and the wandering life of the
pedler, and the unheard struggles of the country and the
mountain folk, the consecration and the Poet’s dream.
He was the first who isolated life after life in tender and
homely narrative, and made us feel that God was with
simple men and women; that in their lives were profound
lessons ; that the same equal heart beat in the palace and
the hamlet hidden in the hills; that all men were brothers
in the charities which soothe and bless, in the moral
duties which God demands, in the feelings which nature
awakens in their hearts; that a spirit of independence
and stern liberty is the birthright and the passion of the
poorest shepherd, as well as of the patriots who fill the
pages of history.

One of the best examples of this is the way in which
he sympathised with the love of the statesmen for their
land. In his “Repentance,” a pastoral ballad, he describes
the misery, the consuming dullness of the small farmer’s
life who has parted with his estate, and lost with it the tie
that bound him to his ancestors. In ‘‘ Michael,” when mis-
fortune comes on the shepherd, Wordsworth describes,
and in lines that show how deep his sympathy was with
the humble feeling, how strong it was—

Isabel, said he,
I have been toiling more than seventy years,
And in the open sunshine of God’s love
Have we all lived ; yet if these fields of ours
204 Theology in the English Poets.

Should pass into a stranger’s hands, I think
That I could not lie quiet in my grave.

The land
Shall not go from us, and it shall be free ;
He shall possess it, free as is the wind
That passes over it,

Nor did he in after-life lose this close sympathy with
the independence of the individual. The last book of the
“ Tixcursion”’ is full of passages that maintain the rights
of men to individual development, to freedom from the
oppression of unremitting toil, to all the means of educa-
tion that the State can give. The worst fate that could
befall a poor as well as a rich man, was to be turned into
a mere instrnment,—

Our life is turned
Out of her course, wherever man is made
An offering, or a sacrifice, a tool
Or implement, a passive thing employed
As a brute mean, without acknowledgment
Of common right or interest in the end ;
Used or abused as selfishness may prompt.

Lines which might be taken as a motto by the Trades’
Unions.

This was the practical way in which he carried out the
revolutionary idea that each man was to-have the freest
room for self-development, to be considered separate from
the rest, not lost ina class. And he embodied these views
in his Poems. The first book of the ‘“ Excursion” will
never let us forget the power, the simple dignity, the
capacity for refined feeling which may be in the poorest
whom we meet. Two neglected Poems, “The Brothers,”
and “ Michael,” are exquisite from the sense they leave
in us of the human reality and passionate tenderness
In Wordsworth. 205

which are to be found in the humblest lives. It
was indeed republican to gather round the sorrows of
children and their innocent talk, round names like
“Matthew” and “Lucy Fell” and the “Idiot Boy,”
the interests and the feelings of England. His very
theory of Poetic diction—that it should be that which
men commonly use when in rustic life they express
themselves simply, and in accordance with which the
Lyrical Ballads were written—was itself due to his
republican opinions. Both the theory and the poems
astonished men at first; but they made their way, till
a truer sentiment of Equality and Fraternity knit
together the rich and the poor. He felt, and truly
felt, that his writings. of this kind “would co-
operate with the benign tendencies in human nature and
society ; that they delineated not merely such feclings as
all men sympathize with, but revealed such feelings as
men may sympathize with, and such as there is reason to
believe they would be better and more moral beings if
they did sympathize with; ’’ he wrote with ‘“‘a view to
show that men who do not wear fine clothes may feel
deeply ; that the spirit of resolution and independence
was rooted in many parts of the country, and that the
State should endeavour to support and not eradicate it ;”
with the design to ‘recover for the poor the rights of the
human family and the franchises of universal brotherhood,
of which they had been robbed by the wealthy and the
noble; to impress the world with a sense of their dignity
in suffering, and the moral grandeur of their honest
poverty.”

Love had he found in huts where poor men lie.
206 Theology in the English Poets.

Connected with the whole of this love for the lives of
common men was his love for the lowlier flowers. We
see the influence of this element of his republicanism in
the thoughtful and tender poems that he wrote about the
common people of the fields and hedgerows—the daisy,
the celandine, the daffodils, the primrose, and the snow-
drop. These also he exalted by the influence of his
imagination as much as the poor who loved them, and it
was his delight to make them and their ways the image
of mankind.

Nor did he neglect the lower ranges of mankind.
None was so low as to be scorned without a sin, none
without offence to God cast out of view. The old beggars
who wandered uselessly about Cumberland awoke his
poetic pity. In describing one of them, Wordsworth saw
in him aman who, though he perhaps did no good himself,
was yet the cause of good in others, and to whom at least
Nature was always kind.

Then let him pass, a blessing on his head !
And while in that vast solitude to which
The tide of things has borne hin, he appears
To breathe and live but for himself alone,
Unblamed, uninjured, let him bear about
The good which the beuignant law of Heaven
Has hung around him: and, while life is his,
Still let him prompt the uulettered villagers
To tender offices and pensive thoughts.
—Thea Ict him pass, a blessing on his head !
And, long as he can wander, let him breathe
The freshness of the valleys ; let his blood
Struggle with frosty air and winter snows ;
And let the chartered wind that sweeps the heath

Beat his grey locks against his withered face.
* * * * *
Ln Wordsworth. 207

Te his the natural silence of old age!

Let him be free of mountain solitudes ;

And have around him, whether heard or not,
The pleasant melody of woodland birds.

He saw in the idiots who roved about the villages
those whose life was hidden in God. He had compassion
on the immoral; the gipsies who idly went through the
country were the children of free Nature: the farmer of
Tilbury Vale who had run away from his debts was one
in whose frank ease of heart, and in whose simple affection
for Nature, good lay hidden. And with an exquisite
touch of loving-kindness he brings around those whom
society had cast aside the gentleness and love of Nature,
till, learning from her, we feel pity and kindness for the
outcast. Every one knows the “ Reverie of Poor Susan,”
but the description of the old farmer in London and of
the love of Nature for him, is not so well known, and is
characteristic of Wordsworth’s tenderness to the erring.

Tn the throng of the town like a stranger is he,
Like one whose own country’s far over the sea ;
And Nature, while through the great city he hies,
Full ten times a day takes his heart by surprise.

This gives him the fancy of one that is young,

More of soul in his face than of words on his tongue 5
Like a maiden of twenty he trembles and sighs,

And tears of fifteen will come into his eyes,

*Mid coaches and chariots, a waggon of straw,

Like a magnet, the heart of old Adam can draw;
With a thousand soft pictures his memory will teem,
And his hearing is touched with the sounds of a dream.

Now farewell, old Adam! when low thou art laid,
May one blade of grass spring up over thy head ;
And I hope that thy grave, wheresoever it be,

Will hear the wind sigh through the leaves of a tree.

Nor did this reverence for ‘ the power he served,
208 Theology in the English Poets.

sacred power, the Spirit of Humanity;” nor his love of the
simple poor, and his sense that Nature loved them
though man might not, cease to abide with him as he
grew old. There is a sonnet, written in 1831, which
embodies this continuous interest. Jt ought to be read
along with another written nearly thirty years before on
the same kind of subject, not only for the interest of
comparing the same thought in different expressions, but
for the interest of comparing the change of style—the
earlier one being in his best manner.* Even later, in
1842, when he is mourning over the state of England,

he feels himself the apostle of humanity.

He describes

his poems as coming from one whose voice

—Devoted to the love whose seeds
Are sown in every human breast, to beauty,
Lodged within compass of the humblest sight,
To cheerful intercourse with wood and field,
And sympathy with man’s substantial griefs—

he hopes will not be heard in vain.

* T place these Sonnets opposite one another :—

ADMONITION,

Well may’st thou halt—and gaze
with brightening eye !

The lovely Cottage in the guardian
nook

Hath stirred thee deeply: with its
own dear brook,

Its own small pasture, almost its

own sky!

But covet not the Abode :—forbear
to sigh,

As many do, repining while they
look ;

Intruders—who would tear from
Nature's book
This precious leaf with harsh im-

piety.

HIGULAND HUT.

See what gay wild flowers deck
this earth-built Cot,

Whose smoke, forth-issuing whence
and how it may,

Shines in the greeting of the sun’s
first ray

Like wreaths of vapour without
stain or blot.

The limpid mountain rill avoids it
not;

Aud why should’st thon? — If
rightly trained and bred,
Humanity is humble, finds no

spot
Which her Heaven-guided fect re-
fuse to tread.
In Wordsworth. 209

These were the results of the reverence for human
nature which he had learnt from the Revolution, and to
which he had added the strong religions element I have
sufficiently indicated. I quote in conclusion of this first
part of my subject, and as resuming and confirming much
that has been said, a passage from the Preface to the
Lyrical Ballads :— -

‘‘The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems
was to choose incidents and situations from common life,
and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as
was possible, in a selection of language really used by
men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a cer-
tain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things
should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect ;
and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and
situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though
not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature;
chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we asso-
ciate ideas in a state of excitement, Humble and rustia
life was generally chosen, because, in that condition, the
essential passions of the heart find a better soil in

Think what the Home must be if The walls are cracked, sunk is the

it were thine, flowery roof,

Even thine, though few thy wants! Undressed the pathway leading to
—Roof, window, door, the door ;

The very flowers are sacred tothe But love, as Nature loves, the
Poor, lonely Poor ;

The roses to the porch which they Search, for their worth, some gen-
entwine : tle heart wrong-proof,

Yea, all, that now enchants thee, Mook, patient, kind, and, were its
from the day : _ trials fewer,

On which it should be touched, Belike less happy—Stand no more
would melt away. _ aloof !

[1804 2 {1831.

P
210 Theology in the English Poets

which they can attain their maturity, are less under
restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic lan-
guage; because in that condition of life our elementary
feelings co-exist in a state of greater simplicity, and
consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and
more forcibly communicated; because the manners of
rural life germinate from those elementary feelings, and,
from the necessary character of rural occupations, are
more easily comprehended, and are more durable; and,
lastly, because in that condition the passions of men are
incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of
nature. The language, too, of these men has been
adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its real
defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or
disgust) because such men hourly communicate with the
best objects from which the best part of language is
originally derived; and because, from their rank in
society and the sameness and narrow circle of their inter-
course, being less under the influence of social vanity,
they convey their feelings and notions in simple and
unelaborated expressions. Accordingly, such a language,
arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is
amore permanent, and a far more philosophical language
than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets,
who think that they are conferring honour upon them-
selves and their art, in proportion as they separate
themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge
in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression, in order
to furnish food for fickle tastes, and fickle appetites, of
their own creation.”

II, With regard to the second point, Wordsworth found
ln Wordsworth. 211

France steeped in the abstract political theories which her
literary men had poured out upon her for half a century.
They were not politicians in the sense of mingling in
political action, but they occupied themselves almost
altogether in writing about government, the origin of
society, the natural rights of man, the limits of authority,
the true principles of laws, the relations of man to man.

Every man had a different theory, but one general idea
lay beneath them all,—* the substitution of some simple
and elementary rules of government in accordance with
reason and the law of nature, for the complicated and
worn-out traditions which directed their present Society.”
That was the political philosophy of the 18th century, as
De Tocqueville reads it,

These writings spread everywhere. All France read
and thought, and by-and-by there grew up in the im-
agination of the people an imaginary society, in which all
laws were simple, conformed to reason and nature; in
which all men were equal, were brothers, and were free.
Tt was a dream that seized on the hearts and minds of all
men. They lived in an ideal city, the palaces of which
were built by theory; and when what they dreamt was
realized, as they thought, in America, the Revolution
took substance. And Wordsworth with his friend took
up these theories, and discussed with the ardour of
youth the government of nations, what it ought to be,
and how far the weal or woe of a people depends “ upon
their laws and fashion of the State.” In long talks
with Beaupuis he argued—

about the end
Of civil government, and its wisest forms ;
212 Theology in the English Poets,

Of ancient loyalty, and chartered rights,
Custom and habit, novelty and change ;
Of self-respect, and virtue in the few

Tor patrimonial honour set apart ;

And ignorance in the labouring multitude,

The noble passage I read last Sunday, in which he
describes the romantic ardour with which all men were
rapt away into schemes that did not then seem Utopian
for the regeneration of mankind, is a picture of his own
impassioned hopes at a time when the “ senselessness of
joy was sublime.” He looked forward and saw Liberty
building her palace upon strong foundations, and sending
from her council-chamber laws which should make

Social life,

Through knowledge spreading and imperishable,

As just in regulation, and as pure

As individual in the wise and good,
How far these political theories and hopes entered into
and formed part of Wordsworth’s mind is now our
subject. They made him ever afterwards interested
in men, not only as persons, but as citizens of a State.
They made him take the greatest interest, far greater
than any other English poet of the time, in all political
and national movements in England and Europe,
Living apart from the world, retired as a noontide
grove in the solitudes of Grasmere, he yet threw
himself, and that with the passion of a poct, into
the fate of France, of Switzerland, of Spain, of St.
Domingo, of the war on the Continent. He wrote a
long pamphlet on the Convention of Cintra, and cast
the main thoughts of the pamphlet into poetic form
in his sonnets. The internal government of England
L[n Wordsworth. 213

and the duties of the State to English citizens were
continually before his mind. Every one remembers
the dreary discussion in the “Excursion” upon Educa-
tion; few have réad his long essay on the Poor Law, in
which he treats of the state of the paupers, of the
workmen congregated in manufactories, of joint stock
companies, of the relation of capital and labour, and of
the Church and Dissent. They were strange subjects
for a poet, and he threw many of them into poetical
form; and at least they prove that the seed sown in his
mind on the banks of the Loire when wandering with his
friend Beaupuis had grown into a tree. But the whole of
its growth was modified by Wordsworth’s individuality.
After a gloomy passage in his life, when disappointed in
France, he gave himself wholly up for a time to mere social
theories—an experience of his that I shall speak of in
another lecture—the theoretical element was cast aside,
and the practical English sense of the man brought his
early dreams to the test of fact. Nothing can better
illustrate the difference between the two nations than the
experience of Wordsworth. For a short time he was
wholly French, indulging in those theories which, applied
without political knowledge, make violent revolutions ;
returning to this country he became, though still repub-
lican, practical. Wishing for the overthrow of the
Monarchy and the aristocracy, believing that “ here-
ditary distinctions and privileged orders of every species
counteracted the progress of human improvement ;’’ he
yet spoke strongly against the hasty destruction of them,
and “recoiled from the very idea of a revolution.” In
1814 his theory of Equality, as we see from the last book
214 Theology in the English Poets.

of the “Excursion,” was based, not on the vague phrase
of the rights of Man, but on the facts that God has given
the same gifts to all alike—love of natural beauty, reason,
imagination, freedom in the will, conscience, death, im-
mortality, the primal duties, the common charities of
life. He who works from this ground will come to a
very different conclusion from that which landed the
French Revolution in a new and enthralling despotism.
For it is the ground of common duties making common
rights among men, and the common duties are founded
on the common Fatherhood of God and the Brother-
hood and Equality of men in Him, This is exactly the
principle which, in my last lecture, I said needed to be
added to those of the revolution to secure their perma-
nence; and it is a theological idea which Wordsworth
added to the poetry of Man,

As to the right to political liberty which was then
contended for in France, and based on the theory of the
rights of Man without any distinct reference to God,
indeed, afterwards with a distinct repudiation of God; it
was supported by Wordsworth, as we have seen, with all
his heart, but it was supported as the will and work of
God. In the “ Descriptive Sketches,” written in October
as he was wandering on the banks of the Loire, all
Nature is made more beautiful to him by his dreams of
the advent of perfect liberty; a milder light fell from the
skies, the river rolled with more majestic course, the
foliage shone with richer gold. But as he wrote he
heard the gathering of the enemies of freedom, he fore-
saw that the land would soon be wrapt in fire, and that all
the promise in his heart could not be fulfilled. Yet,
In Wordsworth. 215

undespondent, he appealed to God as the source and
protector of the work that France was doing against
the oppressing kings of Europe.

Great God! by whom the strifes of men are weighed
In an impartial balance, give thine aid
To the just cause ; and, oh! do thou preside
Over the mighty stream now spreading wide :
So shall its waters, from the heavens supplied
In copious showers, from earth by wholesome springs,
Brood o’er the long-parched lands with Nile-like wings !
And grant that every sceptred child of clay
Who cries presumptuous, “ Here the flood shall stay,”
May in its progress see thy guiding hand,
And cease the acknowledged purpose to withstand ;
Or, swept in anger from the insulted shore,
Sink with his servile bands, to rise no more !

As to the various theories of government of which
he heard, we do not find that they had much influence
on him. He did not care for indulging in Utopias
upon paper; and the only place where we meet cut
and dry systems of government is when he began in
and after 1832, to put forward a kind of strong Con-
servative programme in opposition to Reform, in such
pieces as the ‘Evening Voluntaries,” and the ‘“ Sonnets
dedicated to Order,” and the “ Warning to England.”
In the early times, however, from 1801 to 18138, he put
forward no political theories at all, either of government
or of liberty. He turned from them to ask more practical
questions, as he thought; to discover by what inward
forces a nation was free, by what moral powers a state
grew into the best organization. The complete break-
down of theory in France when the whole nation without
a word gave itself into the power of one man, “of men
216 Lheology in the English Poets.

the meanest too,” forced him into this inquiry; and-no
wiser or nobler answer exists on the subjects than in
that magnificent series of sonnets dedicated to national
independence and liberty. They begin with 1802, when
he was again in France and found the nation bending
before Napoleon as First Consul. He looked on the
people and found them wanting in all that could establish
true political greatness or true liberty, and the lines
in which he characterizes France have only too much
meaning now. Speaking of A. Sidney, Marvel, Har-
rington, and Vane, as those “who knew how genuine
glory was put on,” he adds—

France, ’tis strange
Hath brought forth no such souls as we had then,
Perpetual emptiness ! unceasing change }
No single volume paramount, no code,
No master spirit, no determined road ;
But equally a want of books and men.

Their master spirit was himself a slave (and nothing is
finer in Wordsworth than his consistent scorn of Napo-
leon), and the nation that obeyed him must be without
the true elements of political liberty. They could not
exist where power was worshipped as mere power. Unless
it was applied for ends useful and kindly to men, it was
not great, but an idol whose service debased and enslaved
a people. It was even worse when it was founded on
warlike glory or force.

*Tis not in battles that from youth we train
The governors who must be wise and good,
And temper with the sternness of the brain
Thoughts motherly and meek as womanhood.
Ln Wordsworth, 217

Wisdom doth live with children round her knecs :
Books, leisure, perfect freedom, and the talk

Man holds with week-day man in the hourly walk
Of the mind’s business ; these are the degrees

By which true sway doth mount ; this is the stalk
True Power doth grow on; and her rights are these.

Tor under a Power founded on mere glory in war, a nation
lost its own liberty and combined to take liberty from
others. This was the sight he saw in France, and he
turned within himself and to history to find the contrast.
The liberty and greatness of a nation, he answered, were
in its harmony with the laws ef God, such moral laws as
the Prophets of Israel laid down; the ground of its
existence and success was a moral ground, the test of its
liberty was in the virtue and unselfishness of its citizens.
By the soul only, by patience and temperance, by

Honour that knows the path, and will not swerve ;
Affections which, if put to proof, are kind,
And piety towards God ;

by lives given to labour, prayer, to nature and to heaven,
by virtuous homes, and political wisdom founded on moral
law, are nations great and free. It was not riches, which
were akin, “ to fear to change to cowardice and sloth,” for
did not ennobling thoughts depart “ when men changed
swords for ledgers and the student’s bower for gold ?”—
but “ plain living and high thinking ” that were the vital
power in a people against oppression. It was not in
warlike force, but in the patience, temperance, hope and
fortitude of men who loved liberty for the sake of men
and not of themselves, that a people found power to win
their freedom against oppression. Not from

fleets and armies and external wealth,
But from within proceeds a nation’s strength—
218 Theology in the English Poets.

Nor is it intellectual power, or scientific research which in
evil days does most for the cause of Man—but simple
moral force and the strength of natural human feeling
towards things loved by all.

A few strong instincts and a few plain rules,
Among the herdsmen of the Alps, have wrought
More for mankind, at this unhappy day

Than all the pride of intellect and thought.

He sought for these in England, and in 1802 he could not
find them. One knows the sonnet in which, deploring
the evils of his country, he asserts the necessity of the
opposite qualities for the greatness of a people.

WRITTEN IN LONDON, SEPTEMBER, 1802,

O Friend ! T kuow not which way I must look
For comfort, being, as I am, opprest,

To think that now our life is only drest

For show ; mean handy-work of craftsmen, cook,
Or groom !—We must run glittering like a brook
In the open sunshine, or we are unblest :

The wealthiest man among us is the best:

No grandeur now in nature or in book

Delights us. Rapine, avarice, expense,

This is idolatry : and these we adore :

Plain living and high thinking are no more:

The homely beauty of the good old cause

Is gone ; our peace, our fearful innocence,

And pure religion breathing household laws.

Equally fine is the sonnet written in the same year to
Milton, and those which follow calling on his countrymen
to remember the great men of the past who taught us
how rightfully a nation shone in splendour ; to be worthy
to speak the tongue

That Shakespeare spake, the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held,
In Wordsworth. 219

But the despairing view soon passed away, and when the
country went to war with the despot, he became ashamed
of his “ unfilial fears” and found in her the “ bulwark for
the cause of men ;” one, at least, who held that it was

an accursed thing to gaze
On prosperous tyrants with a dazzled eye,

Shall the Godhead, he asks, who dwells in Nature and the
affections and the soul of man, pour his bounty on city
and on field, and yet have no thought of the awful con-
test for the liberties of man; is it to be our doom, to have
no hope, to have faith in no promise of God ?

Nay, forbid it Heaven !
We know the arduous strife, the eternal laws
To which the triumph of all good is given,
High sacrifice, and labour without pause,
Even to the death—else wherefore should the eye
Of man converse with immortality ?

He followed the whole continental struggle of the
nations against Napoleon, step by step; and as year by
year the ambition of Napoleon declared itself as the will
of France, as the nation which had preached liberty laid
itself at the feet of onc man, and went forth to enslave; as
year by year the nation which had declared the equal
rights of man, fought to take away those rights; as year
by year, the nation which had said that there was but one
nation, the nation of mankind, laboured to prove by
violence that there was only one nation—the nation of
France—that mankind was created for France and not
France for mankind; as year by year every principle of
the Revolution was reversed— Wordsworth felt more and
more strongly the uselessness of mere political theories to
220 Theology in the English Poets.

give birth to permanent liberty, and he put them out of
his mind,

But it was a somewhat perilous thing for a poet of Man
to lose his interest in theories of Man. For it is on theory
and the ideas it presupposes that the poet who would
speak of mankind exists. They are his nectar and
ambrosia, and when he can delight in them and assimilate
them no longer, he sinks out of the ideal life and world,
where art abides, into the common and the common-
place. But if he have once lived therein, he brings with
him and retains for a time the celestial light, and he may
manage, as Wordsworth did, to find poetry in life’s
familiar face for many years. Yet, as time goes on—
never soaring into the impossible or towards it, never lost
in an Idea—he wins no Promethean fire, breathes none
of that diviner air which would enable him to glorify the
common, to see the infinite hope in the mean reality.
Then the light he has had lingers, but it slowly dies
away, and the prose of life overcomes his human poetry
in the end. It was very well for Wordsworth to give up
theories about the future of man, but he did so too com-
pletely, and the end thereof was Prose,
ln Wordsworth, 225

LECTURE XI.

darrell ied

In speaking last Sunday afternoon of the three great
lines of thought on which Wordsworth’s interest ran,
when in France he was brought into contact with the
Revolution, I omitted the last, for which there was no
time. It was the moral aspect of the Revolution as the
avenger of oppression, and the general hatred of the oppres-
sion of nations by tyrannous rule. It was a hatred which
he learnt from what he saw in France, and it lasted almost
his whole life, though it changed its form. And it was
accompanied—though he had put aside theories of liberty
and the rights of Man—by a steady ardour for liberty,
which diminished but never altogether died. These are
the points on which I shall enlarge in this lecture.

The Revolution which began in a dream of the Golden
Age ended in the Reign of Terror. Arising as the
saviour, it became the inveterate destroyer. And this
was the reason of the change—that the theories which
the literary class had conceived the ignorant and
brutalized lower classes carried out, and the natural
result was the fury and blood of the Terror. The lower
classes were ignorant and slaves; at every point of daily
life they were met by the greed of the nobles, and by the
222 Theology in the English Poets.

irresponsible action of the law; tax after tax wrung
from them the fruits of all their labour; and the taxes,
being exacted not so much by government as by the class
of the nodlesse, fixed their hatred on a class with whom
they had now neither political nor social ties. The
government itself educated them for the revolutionary
work they did in the Reign of Terror. It seized on pro-
perty at its own arbitrary will. All the land was by right
the king’s, and whenever the State wished to make a road,
it drove it right through one small property after another,
generally without paying a penny. Every poor proprietor,
so damaged, learnt the doctrine that private property
must give way, without any claim, to public interests.
It was a root idea of the Revolution. Again, in the case
of crimes against the State, there were exceptional.
tribunals; the villages were visited by night, men were
carried off without a warrant and never seen again, their
condemnation was done in half an hour under a mere form
of trial. No man’s liberty was safe from the caprice of
those who had power or interest with those in power.

In this way, a taste for this sort of work was actually
taught to the people—they were educated for the revolu-
tionary tribunals, The forms of these things were given
by the old régime; the Revolution added to them, says
‘De Tocqueville, the atrocities of its genius.

With all this and its results Wordsworth was brought
into contact. He touches on all the points I have men-
tioned in the “ Prelude;”? he and his friend discussed
them with fiery indignation, till at last, “hatred of
absolute rule where the will of one is the law of all,”
and where the nobles were on the side of absolute
In Wordsworth. 223

dominion as against the people, seized on. them,
mingled with pity and with love for the miserable multi-
tude. They met a hunger-bitten girl, driving her heifer
through the lane in despairing solitude—‘“ Tis against
that that we are fighting,” said Beaupuis in agitation ;
they heard a dreadful and pathetic story of two lovers,
Vaudracour and Julia, where, by the monstrous law that
enabled a father’s tyranny to imprison a son, the man was
driven to fatal crime, and both man and woman to hope-
less misery. Seeing these things the two friends were
thrown into passionate opposition, and into as passionate
hopes that at least the time was come when—

Captivity by mandate without law

Should cease ; and open accusation lead
To sentence in the hearing of the world,
And open punishment, if not the air

Be free to breathe in, and the heart of man
Dread nothing.

More even than this negative hope they dreamed—

I with him believed
That a benignant spirit was abroad
Which might not be withstood, that poverty
Abject'as this would in a little time
Be found no more, that we should see the earth
Unthwarted in her wish to recompense
The meck, the lowly, patient child of toil :
All institutes for ever blotted out
That legalised exclusion, empty pomp
Abolished, sensual state and cruel power,
Whether by edict of the oue or few ;
And finally, as sum and crown of all,
Should see the people having a strong hand
In framing their own laws ; whence better days
To all mankind,

When Beaupuis left bim and afterwards “ perished in
224 Theology in the English Poets.

supreme command” in the war against Ia Vendés,
Wordsworth went to Paris at the end of 1792, The Sep-
tember massacres were just over, the King in prison, and
the quarrel between the Girondists and the Mountain in full
swing. It was a time well calculated to excite to a higher
level the mind of Wordsworth, and the passage in which
he describes the intensity with which he felt the passion
of the whole city is one of the finest in the “ Prelude.”

But that night
I felt most deeply in what world I was,
What ground I trod on, and what air I breathed,
High was my room and lonely, near the roof
Of a large mansion or hotel, a lodge
That would have pleased me in more quiet times ;
Nor was it wholly without pleasure then.
With unextinguished taper I kept watch,
Reading at intervals ; the fear gone by
Pressed on me almost like a fear to come,
I thought of those September massacres,
Divided from me by one little month,
Saw them and touched: the rest was conjured up
From tragic fictions or true history,
Remembrances and dim admonishments,
The horse is taught his manage, and no star
Of wildest course but treads back his own steps ;
For the spent hurricane the air provides
As fierce a successor ; the tide retreats
But to return out of its hiding-place
In the great deep; all things have second birth ;
The earthquake is not satisfied at once ;
And in this way 1 wrought upon myself,
Until I seemed to hear a voice that cried,
To the whole city, ‘Sleep no more,” The trance
Fled with the voice to which it had given birth ;
But vainly comments of a calmer mind
Promised soft peace and sweet forgetfulness,
The place, all hushed and silent as it was,
Appeared unfit for the repose of night,
Defenceless as a wood where tigers roam,
In Wordsworth, 225

His very inmost soul was agitated, but not for a moment
against the principles of the Revolution. He took the
side against Robespierre, but felt that Robespierre was the
strongest; and a hundred hopes and desires went rushing
through his mind, as he thought how the earlier form
of the movement might be preserved. Would not all
nations come and help France to carry out her first great
resolutions ? Will not some one man, trusting in ideas
and strong in such trust, self-restrained, nobly trained for
rule, arise and dominate the struggle, even though he
met with death? Would not death be nothing to such a
man, for he would gladly obey the Sovereign Law that
calls for sacrifice? or one thing was only to be sought
for—the overthrow of Tyrants. One thing was sure—
for he had no doubt of the end—freedom must win the
day as against oppression. He threw himself into the
party of the Brissotins, and it was only “ by the gracious
providence of Heaven,” or as it seemed then to him,
‘‘ dragged by a chain of harsh necessity,” that, compelled
to leave France, he escaped the fate of his friends. From
thence he watched the growth of the Reign of Terror in
France, but though he hated its excesses, he was not
shocked by it into any retreat from his opinions. He
saw in it all, though he confessed its enormity, the neces-
sary work of vengeance—the vengeance of God Himself
upon the guilty. However done, these long cruelties had
to be expiated, and the abuses which caused them crushed,
and if there were men who still supported them, so much
the worse for the men. They must die—who innocently
or guiltily subserve oppression; nor should war be

avoided with those who from without hindered the march
Q
226 Theology in the English Poets.

of freedom, even though his own country took part in
such a war. Therefore it was that when he returned
to England, and war, after the execution of the king
in 1798, was declared by England against France, he
received a blow which shocked his whole moral nature.
Was it possible that his country was on the side of
oppression against the destroyers of oppression; and
so deep was the feeling, that he, than whom none was
a truer patriot, but who yet was more a prophet of
Humanity than a patriot, wished and prayed that the
ams of England might fall lifeless in the battle, and
her hosts be scattered by the young Republic? He
exulted in the victories of the Republic, he followed
them with as great delight, as was the sorrow with
which he groaned over the insults heaped on liberty by
the crew of Robespierre. But even the Reign of Terror
at its worst did not make him lose hope; when the tyrant
fell, he prophesied a new deliverance for France.

But when the career of Napoleon began, though his
ardour for liberty did not alter, it changed its form.
Oppressed France became the oppressor, and the work of
Napoleon stirred into a warmer flame the hatred of op-
pression which the Revolution had awakened in Words-
worth. In wrath and pity he threw himself into the cause
of distressed nationalities; he remembered the starving
people—the cruelty which came of irresponsible will and
greed, and he saw in Napoleon the concentration into
one man of all the elements of the evil which had
darkened the old régime. All men, all people who fought
against him were on the side of God, even though they
had been on the side of the devil for years before.
Li Wordsworth. a0

An indignant sonnet recorded his horror at the attack
upon the Swiss, another mourned for the fate of Venice,
once the eldest child of liberty; another poured its pity
upon Toussaint, imprisoned by Napoleon, and in a noble
outburst bid him live and take comfort, for the worlds
of Nature and of Man fought upon his side.

Thon hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee: air, earth and skics,
There’s not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee ; thou hast great allies ;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man’s unconquerable mind,

A whole series followed with eager hope and enccurage-
ment the struggle of Hofer and the Tyrolese; another
series records his passionate interest in the efforts of Spain
against the oppression of France. One of these I quote,
partly because it was a favourite of Wordsworth’s, but
chiefly because it hits sharply the vile falsehood by which
Napoleon most defamed the Revolution when he declared
that he came as the Apostle of freedom to the nations
ever whom, the moment they were lured into his hands,
he set up an exhausting tyranny. It is entitled “ The
Indignation of a High-minded Spaniard,”

1810.

We can endure that He should waste our lands,
Despoil our temples, and by sword and flame
Return us to the dust from which we came ;

Such food a Tyrant’s appetite demands :

And we can brook the thought that by his hands
Spain may be overpowered, and he possess,

For bis delight, a solemn wilderness

Where all the brave lie dead, But, when of bands

Qa
228 Theology in the Englsh Poets,

Which he will break for us he dares to speak,

Of benefits, and of a future day

When our enlightened minds shall bless his sway ;

Then, the strained heart of fortitude proves weak ;

Our groans, our blushes, our pale cheeks declare

That he has power to inflict what we lack strength to bear,

At last, the year after the ‘‘ Excursion” was published,
the long contest closed at Waterloo, and the Oppressor
was overthrown. Two “ Thanksgiving Odes” show how
greatly he was moved, and both bear that deep religious
stamp which marked his work ; both prove how closely he
knit together the fate of nations with the government of
God; both are full of genuine enthusiasm for his country
and of joy at her success, but it is an enthusiasm and a
joy which are gathered together in humble gratitude to
God, in faith that it is He who has done the work of
liberty against tyranny by the hands of England.

Our greatest Poet since Milton was as religious as
Milton, and in both I cannot but think the element of
grandeur of style which belongs so pre-eminently to
them flowed largely from the solemn simplicity and the
strength which a dignified and unbigoted faith in great
realities beyond this world gave to the order of their
thoughts. Coleridge was flying from one speculation to
another all his life. Scott had no vital joy in his belief,
and it did not interpenetrate his poetry. Byron believed
in Fate more than in God. Shelley floated in an ideal
world, which had not the advantage of being generalized
from any realities—and not one of them possesses, though
Byron comes near it now and then, the grand style.
Wordsworth alone, combining fine artistic power with
profound religion, walks when he chooses, though ke
Ln Wordsworth. 229

limps wretchedly at times, with nearly as stately a step
as Milton. He had the two qualitics which always go
with the grand style in poetry—he lived intensely in the
present, and he had the roots of his being fixed in a great
centre of power—faith in the eternal righteousness and
love of God.

And he had this, I believe, more than any other
Poet of the time—more practically far than Shelley—
because the cause of man was so dear to him, and because
he saw that the cause of man was the cause of God. That
truth, the profoundest truth of Christianity, he had
grasped with his greatest strength. His poetic work did
not enthral him—did not in itself alone possess its own
desire; he bent it to larger ends than those of giving
transient pleasure. He not only reflected faithfully the
feelings of human nature, he went further. A great
poet, he says, ought to do more than this; he
ought “to rectify men’s feelings, to give them new
compositions of feeling, to render their feelings more
sane, pure and permanent; in short, more consonant
to Nature, that is, to eternal Nature and the great
moving spirit of things.” And he has proved by his
work, that the great poet ought to do more than even
this; he ought to expand men’s sympathies over the
great interests and movements of nations, to beautify the
great truths on which the moral and political progress of
nations rest, to add emotion to the ideas: of liberty and
brotherhood, to bid men look forward and labour for not
only their own country’s highest good, but for the restora-
tion of all things, to keep the hope and faith of a millen-
nium ever before our eyes, to be the Prophet of mankind.
230 Theology in the English Poets.

And this was something of Wordsworth’s work, only it
was not done by vague prophecies like Shelley’s ; it was
done by taking up the events of the day and applying to
them principles which led him to give as much interest
and emotion to the struggles of distresscd Europe with
an overwhelming Imperialism as he gave to the struggles
‘of the dalesmen of Grasmere with the overmastering
forces of Nature.

The pity of it is, that this power did not last till the
very close. After Napoleon’s overthrow he grew some-
what sick of the present, and for the first time turned to
the past for his subjects, It was then that such poems as
‘TLaodamia” and ‘ Dion” were written. As time wore on,
he became less widely human and more Wordsworthian :
the intense one-sidedness with which he always treated
his subjects grew more conscious of itself, and at last
pleased with itself; the want of living in the world,
among men and movements, the want of being himself
moved by any great impulse such as had transported
him in youth, fixed him down into illiberal opinions at
last. He still maintained his hatred of oppression, his
love of liberty, but in practice both the hatred and the
love broke down. The moral, temperate element in him,
the abhorrence of violence and disorder, the love of the
old—which in the first part of his life had formed a
useful check upon his revolutionary enthusiasm, so that
he always kept his head, grew,—now that the Revolu-
tion and the Empire itself had horrified him — into
-devouring prominence, and he lost in his old age that
‘balance of opinions which mark sanity of mind. It is
‘not strange to find him opposing the bill tor admit-
Ln Wordsworth, 231

ting Nonconformists to the Universities without any
subscription or declaration of conformity to the Church,
but it is strange that he should think that this would
endanger the monarchy and social order. It is strange to
find him maintaining that civil disabilities ought to be
removed from every class, and yet that they ought not
to be removed from the Roman Catholics, because to
give liberty to them promoted the cause of spiritual
tyranny. It is curious liberality which in order to pro-
mote liberty violates liberty. It is stranger still, when
we look back to the enthusiast of- the Revolution, to find
him saying in 1832 that the Constitution of England
‘would be destroyed by the Reform Bull, and writing
letters on the subject which are even duller than such
‘Poems as the ‘‘ Warning,” and the “ Sonnets to Order,”
and that is saying a great deal. Whata change from
the earlier dignity of his poetry, how curiously infe-
licitous the phrases, how meagre the style—a kind
of poor extemporary prayer in verse—are the following
lines :—

 

O for a bridle bitted with remorse

To stop your Leaders in their headlong course !
Oh may the Almighty scatter with his grace
These mists, and lead you to a safer place,

By paths no human wisdom can foretrace—
May He pour round you, from worlds far above
Mav’s feverish passions, His pure light of love!

Nevertheless it is but right to say that Wordsworth’s
dislike to the liberal movements in 1832 and afterwards,
was in his own mind, founded on love of constitutional
liberty. It is the statement of the Conservative, but still
it would be unfair to call him-a bigoted Conservative.
wee Theology in the English Poets.

He wished, for example, that representation could be
thrown more fairly into the hands of the property of the
country, and less into the hands of the great proprietors.
It was a change from the time when he thought it
degrading to human nature to set up property in pre-
ference to person as a title to legislative power, but it was
not a bigoted change. He could speak plainly even in
1844 as to the duties of the great landowners and manu-
facturers to the poor. ‘ One would wish,” he writes,
‘to see the rich mingle with the poor as much as may
be on a footing of fraternal equality. The old feudal
dependencies and relations are almost gone from England,
and nothing has yet come adequately to supply their
place. Why should not great landowners look for a sub-
stitute for what is lost of feudal paternity in the higher
principles of Christianised: humanity and humble-minded
brotherhood?’’ It was on these principles that the old
man himself lived among the poor that surrounded him,
when young and old met at Rydal to keep his birthday.
Nor was it change he disliked, but reckless sweeping
change; and the changes wrought by the Reform Bill
seemed such to him. We must remember that he was
then sixty-two years old, and had lived too much apart
from men. Much may be pardoned to old age that one
does not pardon to youth, and Wordsworth himself says
that he had lost ‘courage in the sense the word bears
when applied by Chaucer to the animation of birds in
spring time.” He had seen a Revolution in a foreign
country, and he had not courage now to face another in
his own. He expected that something of the same
violence which had made him recoil from France, would
In Wordsworth, 233

prevail in England after the Reform Bill, and he advo-
cated, if change was necessary, a slower, wiser change.
The following sonnet, not so poor poetically as others of
the same period, is interesting as embodying his views
and referring to the French Revolution.

Loug-favoured England ! be not thou misled

By monstrous theories of alien growth,

Lest alien frenzy seize thee, waxing wroth,

Self-smitten till thy garments reek dyed red

With thy own blood, which tears in torrents shed

Fail to wash out, tears flowing ere thy troth

Be plighted, not to ease but sullen sloth,

Or wan despair—the ghost of false hope fled

Into a shameful grave. Among thy youth,

My Country! if such warning be held dear,

Then shall a Veteran's heart be thrilled with joy,

One who would gather from eternal truth,

For time and season, rules that work to cheer—

Not scourge, to save the People—not destroy.

When things, however, were not so close to him, when
he came into contact with the struggle of liberty ina
foreign country, his sympathy with the oppressed seems
to have been nearly as strong as ever. One would scarcely
conceive Wordsworth, when almost seventy, as a sup-
porter of the Carbonari, but such was the case, and those
who love Italy and Wordsworth cannot but be pleased to
bring them together. In 1842 he mourned over the
decay of Italy, and saw in the Lago Morto its emblem.
“ Be its depths quickened,” he cries out with some return
of his ancient energy-—

What thou dost inherit

Of the world’s hopes, dare to fulfil: awake,
Mother of Heroes, from thy death-like sleep !

And in another sonnet, the last part of which I quote,
234 Theology in the English Poets.

-he breaks into a prophecy which God has fulfilled in our
own time—
Fallen Power !
Thy fortunes, twice exalted, might provoke
Me to glad notes prophetic of the hour
When thou, uprisen, shalt break thy double yoke,
And enter, with prompt aid from the Most High,
On the third stage of thy great destiny.
But in the case of Italy also, taught, as he held, by the
fate of France, he was against all rash schemes and
popular passion. Writing about the insurrections in
Bologna in 1837, he declares that by no mere fit of
sudden passion is freedom won, and urges gradual pro-
gress, noiscless pains, and moderation. And the advice
he gives is noble enough and characteristic of him, nor is
it one which the Italians would despise. It was at the
root of all Mazzini’s later teaching to his people ‘0,
great Italian nation,” Wordsworth writes,—
Let thy scope
Be one fixed mind for all: thy rights approve
To thy own conscience gradually renewed ;
Learn to make Time the father of wise Hope ;
Then trust thy cause to the arm of Fortitude,
The light of Knowledge, and the warmth of Love.

It has seemed to me worth while, though at some length,
to look into the question of Wordsworth’s later Conser-
vatism, and to show that he did not merit the violent
expressions used about his change. Apostate, renegade,
were terms equally unjust and unworthy to be applied to
one who had done so much for Man. Still he suffered
from the change. I have already said that with the decay
of his natural republicanism, and with the loss of the
ideas of republicanism as the leading thoughts of life,
In Wordsworth. 235

decayed his poetical power when he spoke of man, even
to a certain degree when he spoke of Nature. With
their overthrow decayed also that larger Christianity in
him, which is not personal, but: human; but at the same
time his personal Christianity grew deeper. Nor must
we blame him much for this. ’Twould have been better
had he been as before, the Prophet of liberty and right,
the declarer that the cause of man is the cause of God;
but it is but natural that, as age grows on, our thoughts
‘should centre more round the relation of God to our own
soul than our relation to the world of men, that the
“Evening Voluntaries” should succeed the ‘“ Sonnets
dedicated to Liberty and Independence.”
236 Theology in the English Poets,

LECTURE XII.

—-—

In my last lecture, I was carried far forward to the close
of Wordsworth’s life by my wish to bring under one theme
his earlier and later feelings with regard to the Revolu-
tion. It is necessary now to return to his personal
history, as it touches on the poetry of Man and of Nature.
In doing so there will be some unavoidable repetition, but
that which is repeated will be used in a different connec-
tion and for a different purpose. I have in this lecture
to trace how the failure of his hopes for Man impaired his
love of Nature and his love of Man; how they were
restored, and, finally, how that marriage of his human
mind and Nature, to which we have been looking forward
for so long, was at last fulfilled.

I must, therefore, in order to arrive at the causes which
impaired his love of Nature and Man, return to his per-
sonal history. We left him when he was driyen by stress
of circumstances from France to England in 1793. He
had nearly been involved in the fate of his friends, the
Brissotins, and he followed with intense eagerness the
progress of affairs in France. He refused to seek the
country, and remained in London. It is characteristic of
him at this time, that he took but little interest in the
In Wordsworth, o37

movement for Negro Emancipation, for he felt that if
France prospered, slavery must perish. The principles
there fought for, if established, would strike at the root of
all oppression, and with the destruction of the root, all the
branches of the tree of human slavery would be destroyed,
Negro slavery among the rest.

But as he watched in passionate desire, two things
deprived his watch of all delight and threw him into
almost despair. The first was the union of Englind
with the confederate powers against France; the second
was the Reign of Terror. He never heard the sunset
cannon from the English fleet, as he watched it riding in
the Solent, ere it went to war,

Without a spirit overcast by dark
Imaginations, sense of woes to come,

Sorrow for humankind, and pain of heart.
Prelude, Book x,

It was this first threw him out of his love of Man and
soxred his heart. It was misery to him to sit among the
worshippers who gave praise for his country’s victories,
“like an uninvited guest whom no one owned, to sit
silent, and to brood on the day of vengeance yet to come.”
It was still worse to be tossed between love of England,
and delight that she was beaten by her enemies because
she was false to liberty: a woeful time which those
who afterwards attacked Wordsworth had never gone
through.

Nor did he ever cast his eyes on France without
misery: misery because God seemed to have forgotten
Man, because liberty seemed to have forgotten herself
and to wear the robes of tyranny, because the decds
238 Theology in the English Poets.

then done would be brought in charge against her name.
For years his dreams were haunted with the ghastly
visions of that time; he saw the dungeons, the executions,
the unjust tribunals, and in sleep he seemed to plead in
long orations before their judges,
With a voice
Labouring, a brain confounded, and a sense,

Death-like, of treacherous desertion, felt
In the last place of refuge—my own soul—

Moved in this way to the very centre of his being with the
passion of humanity, troubled, even tortured with con-
flicting emotions, he compared this new love of Man with
his early love of Nature, and both in their relation to.
God.
His love of Nature, whose veins were filled from the

fountain of the grace of God,

Was service paid to things which lie

Guarded within the bosom of God’s will.

Therefore to serve was high beatitude ;

Tumult was therefore gladness, and the fear

Ennobling, venerable ; sleep secure,

And waking thoughts more rich than happicst dreams,

Prelude, book x.
But this new love of Man, how unspeakably unlike!
With what a different ritual did one serve, through it,
the Power Supreme who made man divine! Faith and
calmness seemed to leave his heart when he felt how full.
of doubt, dismay, and sleepless trouble, how sorrowful
the tumult, how dreadful were the dreams, which belonged
to this new service of mankind.
Yet, as he looked deeper—and that he could do this.

marks the temperate courage of Wordsworth as a thinker,
Ln Wordsworth, 239

and the mastery of his intellectual will over mere
emotion, he saw no reason to despair of Man, As the
Prophets, who in their highest inspiration worked with a
human heart troubled for the woes of man, wanted not
consolation in that they saw God in the punishment of
evil, and the triumph of moral law; so Wordsworth saw
beneath the misery of France, God in moral retribution,
and God educating the nation. That was one theological
aspect in which he viewed events.

He looked again, and saw another star of hope for Man
in the self-sacrifice aud virtues of those who suffered.
He saw in a hundred instances that God had not forsaken
human nature. Green spots appeared in the desert, bright
islands of “fortitude, and energy, and love,” of honour,
faith, and sanctity,

And human nature faithful to herself,

amid the dark and stormy seas of the time. For a time
he was thus kept true to his belief of God in Man, in
spite of repeated shocks: his worship and his love,
though dark, were touched with breaks of sunlight.

Then came to support this hope the news that
Robespierre was dead. He heard it as he crossed the
estuary of the Leven, and hope revived within him, more
than hope—enthusiasm.

Great was my transport, deep my gratitude
To everlasting Justice, by this fiat
Made manifest. ‘‘ Come now, ye golden times,”
Said I, forthpouring on those open sands
A hymn of triumph ; ‘‘as the morning comes
From out the bosom of the night, come ye—
Thus far our trust is verified.”
Prelude, book x,
240 Theology in the English Poets.

The world would now, he thought, go forward to rightcous-
ness and peace and liberty.

But he was still doomed to disappointment. Pre-
serving amid the weakness of the new government his
trust in the people, he found it slowly ebb away; and when
Frenchmen changed “ the war of self-defence for one of
conquest, and lost sight of all they struggled for;”” when,
finally, to close her gains, a Pope

Was summoned in to crown an Emperor;

when he saw a people, that once looked to Heaven for
manna,

take a lesson from the dog
Returning to his vomit,

then the crash was too great; he lost faith for a time in
God, in moral right; the old miseries returned to add
their weight to the new; the hopes that had risen again
against the shocks he had received, died now finally; and
he lost his true love of Nature, his true love of Man, or
rather he lost the true foundations on which they were
based. It will be my business to trace how these two
affections were impaired, and how they were restored,
and how, after passing through this trial, they mingled
into one.

In the account given of this mental crisis in the
“ Prelude,” in books xi., xii., and xiii., the two subjects of
the Love of Man and Nature are mingled up together as
poetic emotion led him to speak of each. For the pur-
poses of the lecture we must isolate them from cach
other, but it must be always remembered that they went
on together, pari passu, in his mind. With regard to
In Wordsworth. 241

the love of Nature, it lost its natural, intuitive quality
it became a business of the intellect as stimulated by
seasible images, more than of the heart as impressed by
the same. The first step towards this impairing of his
love of Nature—and it shows how the two things were
mingled up in his mind—was made when he lost hope
for and love of Man in the present and began to look
beyond it, in a merely critical spirit, for a coming race.
He became absorbed in the picture of an ideal mankind
in the future, wholly different, he hoped, from the
wretched creature he knew in the present. He looked
back also to the sages, patriots, and heroes of the past,
and it seemed to him, so dark his mind, that their
“best virtues were not free from taint.” He went to
the Poets to find purer creatures, but if ‘‘ Reason be
nobility in Man,” can anything, he asked, be more
ignoble than the creature they delight to picture,
the miserable slave
Of low ambition and distempered love.

This was the wretched carping condition into which he
fell; he judged mankind by the intellect alone, and shut
out the heart as co-assessor with the intellect. It was by
the understanding alone that he tried to solve those
mysteries of being that make of the human race one
brotherhood, and in so doing he cut himself off from his
poetic nature, and

From all the sources of his former strength.

He even, by the exercise of his critical faculty on Man,
lost the power of conceiving Man as a whole, for it is only

in belief in things not subject to the critical faculty work-
R
242 Theology in the English Poets.

ing alone, such things as the universal sense of right
and wrong, of truth, of common and natural emotions, of
a God, that we have any absolute grounds for holding the
doctrine of an universal humanity.

The slave then of this critical faculty, he could not help
applying it to Nature. Long ago he had believed in a
soul in Nature, aud looked beneath her outward forms in
order to feel this soul and its “impassioned life,” with
heart and intellect at one in the work, and the Soul
of Nature answered to his love and told to him her
secrets.* But now, he had abandoned the thought of a
soul within the world, and love could no longer rule his
life’ with her. He criticised its surface beauty like an
art critic, ‘even in pleasure pleased unworthily.” He
liked here and disliked there as artistic rules led him,
applying rules of art “to things above all art.” He

* Tplace the passage here in order that it may be read in connexion with
the lecture in which I have maintained that Wordsworth gave a Life to
Nature different from ours.

O Soul of Nature ! excellent and fair!
That didst rejoice with me, with whom J, too,
Rejoiced through early youth, before the winds
And roaring waters, and in lights and shades
That marched and countermarched about the hills
In glorious apparition, Powers on whom
I daily waited, now all eye and now
All ear ; but never long without the heart
Employed, and man’s unfolding intellect :
O Soul of Nature! that, by laws divine
Sustained and governed, still dost overflow
With au impassioned life, what feeble ones
Walk on this earth! how feeble I have been
When thou wert in thy strength.

Prelude, book xii,
Ln Wordsworth. 243

compared landscape with landscape, to the disadvantage
of one—

Bent overmuch on superficial things,

Pamporiug myself with meagre novelties

Of colour and proportion-—to the moods

Of time and season, to the moral power,

The affections, and the spirit of the place
Iusensible,

Prelude, book xii.

In this way that spiritual Iragination was impaired
which penetrates to the living heart of Nature, and feels
it beating against the human heart.

Another phase of the same thing also beset him. The
eye took despotism over the rest of his senses and powers,
and held his mind in slavery to its special pleasure. It
had vivid but not profound pleasure in roving from one
landscape to another, and in craving new combinations
of beauty. Still worse, it took pride in this power, and
began to think it nobler than the power of feeling, so
that, at last, it grew so important to him that it laid the
inner faculties asleep.

It is an experience which we see repeated at the pre-
sent day, and its lesson should not be lost on us. A
more complex worldly life creates often, and is creating
now among us, a worldliness of the eye. It lusts after
mere outward beauty, harmonies of colour, picturesque-
ness, exquisiteness of form. And in its insatiable pur-
suit of these, which only touch the senses, the influence
of Nature on the heart is lost. It cannot rest quiet and
content with any beauty; nor assimilate the teaching
Nature gives to the heart and conscience: for it las
no true love of Nature, and without that it only looks

RQ
244 Theology in the English Poets.

long enough to satisfy the eye. It is only love which
enables us to dwell on a thing without weariness. And
this delight in mere outside beauty soon finds satiety,
and flies to something elsc, and, flying thus incessantly,
it never remains long enough by anything to be able
to comprehend it. For a time this was Wordsworth’s
failing, and the cause of it lay not only in that of which -
I have spoken, but also that the troubles of human life
in which he was now involved overrode the silent influ-
ences of Nature, and made his life with Nature share in
the excited life he was leading with Man. He contrasts
this “thraldom of the sense’’—this feverish worldliness
of the eye—with the life which his sister lived with
Nature. In her—

The eye was not the mistress of the heart ;
Far less did rules prescribed by passive taste,
Or barren intermeddling subtleties,
Perplex her mind: but wise as women are
When genial circumstance hath favoured them,
She welcomed what was given, and craved no more ;
Whate’er the scene presented to her view
That was the best, to that she was attuned
By her benign simplicity of life,
And through a perfect happiness of soul,
Whose variegated feelings were in this
Sisters, that they were each some uew delight.
Birds in the bower, and lambs in the green field
Could they have known her, would have loved ; methought
Her very presence such a sweetness breathed,
That flowers, and trees, and even the silent hills,
And everything she looked on, should have had
An intimation how she bore herself
Towards them and to all creatures. God delights
In such a being ; for, her common thoughts
Are piety, her life is gratitude —.
Prelude, book xii,
Lu Wordsworth, 245

So it was with him of old, when he “ worshipped among
the depth of things,” without criticising overmuch; but
now it was different. Yet the evil did not last loag; the
Poet was too strong in him and Nature herself too close.
She fought, he held, against the tyranny of any one sense
over the others—
Summons all the senses each

To counteract the other, and themselves,

Aud makes them all, and the objects with which all

Are conversant, subservient in their turn

To the great ends of Liberty and Power.
, Book xii.

There is an exact analogy to this in Christianity. It
employs all the virtues, and by insisting on a harmony of
them all in the character, endeavours to thwart the
tyranny of any one virtue, which dwelt on exclusively
passes into a vice. But the harmony of all, each doing its
own work in mutual service, makes action free, and gives
to the Will power towards righteousness.

But what redeemed him chiefly were the recollections of
early impressions which he had received from certain
scenes in Nature. He had known, in youth, too forcibly,

Visitings of imaginative power,

for this evil habit to endure their remembrance. Youth
and its powers return to the true heart, however troubled
it has been; the memory of passionate feeling waked by
the influences of grandeur or beauty in Nature, inspires
such joy, that we cannot but return to win from her
again the same passionate feeling as of old. For there
are certain spots of time, and [ analyse here a long
246 Theology in the English Poets.

passage, the recollection of which possesses a renovating
virtue; there are passages of life which give,

Profoundest knowledge to what point, and how,
The mind is lord and master—outward sense
The obedient servant of her will, Such moments
Are scattcred everywhere, taking their date
From our first childhood,
Prelude, book xii,

In these moments Nature impresses herself as a living
Force of passion on the soul. The impressions are deepest
when we are alone and Nature is dreary. For when we
are alone the soul is most receptive, and when she is
dreary there arises in us, aroused by her touch, a wild, in-
voluntary, apparently causeless sorrow. It is, in Words-
worth’s thought, the spirit mourning in itself for that
imperial Palace whence it came, the recollection of a time
of disembodied joy and purity, before it came to earth,
These are the intimations of our Immortality in child-
hood. Nature, working on us from without, sends a
kindling touch that awakens the slumbering powers of
the soul. We are lifted beyond our life of thoughtless-
ness, and feel, half unconsciously, the greatness of the
soul. To these hours we look back, and there is in them,
all sorrowful and vague as they are, virtue to recall us—
when they are refashioned by association and added to by
experience—to higher thoughts, to nourish and repair
imagination when it has been dulled by the wear and
stress of life; to lead us, through their memories, to find
beauty again in the commonplace, the ideal in the dull
reality of life, and the presence of the soul and the passion
of the heart in communion with the life of Nature.
Lu Wordsworth. 247

Such regenerating memories were Wordsworth’s, and
they wrought in him that “ working of the spirit,” those
“inward agitations,” which carry us beyond ourselves into
that region of the spiritual which we always touch but
so seldom enter, into that region of the heart which lies
so close to us but which too often we despise for the
region of the understanding.

Influenced by them, the Poet escaped at last from the
critical, analysing spirit with which he had for a time
confronted the soul of Nature. I shook the habit off, he
says—

Entirely and for ever, and again

In Nature’s presence stood, as now I stand

A sensitive being, a creative soul—
with power as of old to receive sensitively all impressions
from Nature, with power to create, by the working of
imagination on the impressions, new images of thought.
So was it with his love of Nature.

The trial through which his love of Man went ran
on much the same lines. As in the love of Nature
so in the love of Man, he slipt out of the region of in-
tuition in which the Poet most keenly lives, into the
region of speculative opinion. It is not difficult to under-
stand how he got into that region; for it is characteristic
of human nature in youth, when enthusiastic opinions
which have been loved have received a shock from the
contradiction of events, to fight against that contradiction,
even though the heart is failing under the blow it has re-
ceived, This was the case with Wordsworth. Events
seemed to prove that the principles he would have laid down
his life for were null and void, and a vague despair began
248 Theology in the English Poets.

to move in his heart. Along with this was combined the
sneer of men who had hated the Revolution from the
beginning. They turned on Wordsworth with ridicule
and mocked his opinions. And he replied indignantly : he
fought for his views, clung to them as a man clings to
religious opinions of which he has an inner doubt, saying
to himself, ‘If I am wrong, then all is lost.” But having
this inner doubt, his heart and conscience were forced to
cease to take part in his battle against the world, and his
intellect alone was engaged. And then, in the heat of
contest, opinions became all he cared for, till round his
mind

They clung, as if they were its life, nay more

The very being of the immortal soul.

He threw himself into speculative schemes of socialism,
formed an ideal of Man, exalted his reason as the sole
lord of his acts, and strove to conceive a community in
which, like Robert Owen’s, social liberty should be built
on personal, laws should be wholly directed by circum-
stances, man live by his intellect alone, and, shaking off
all degrading pursuits, be absolutely free,

Lord of Himself in undisturbed delight,

But before realizing this scheme, it was necessary to make
an accurate study of society, and he did this by the help
of the understanding alone. He brought all systems,
creeds, and laws before the bar of the reasoning faculty
and asked them to prove their rightness. He demanded
that the soul should give formal proof of its powers.
How did it know that it could distinguish between right
Ln Wordsworth. 249

and wrong, how did it know it was immortal? Had
morality or religion any ground in fact?

What was the result? It was, that looking into these
things without love, and leaving out of the investigation
the imagination and the spirit as means of judging, he
saw not life but death in the world; he lost all certainty.
As one piece of evidence was strong he believed in the
greatness of the soul, as one piece was weak he disbelieved
init. He found himself endlessly perplexed with questions
about impulses, and motives, whether what seemed wrong
was not sometimes right, and what seemed right, wrong.
He could not decide whether there was any eternal rule
of Duty, whether it had any ground in the nature of
things, whether what seemed its sanctions, were sanctions,
or whence the sanctions came; till at last, he became a
sceptic, and yielded up all moral questions in despair.
Man was either—

The dupe of folly or the slave of crime.
Book xii.

This was the lowest depth he reached, and from this he
was saved, first, by the common sense so characteristic of
him among the Poets. It led him to employ his puzzled
reason on some subject whose elements were not disturbed
by human passion. He took to the study of abstract
science, and in realizing its calm realities, his mind grew
calm. He was saved, secondly, by the influence of human
love, which restored to him that reverence for the heart
which he had lost. It was through his sister's influence
that this sacred work was also wrought. She who lived
from the heart, moved ever by his side ; she believed for
him when he disbelieved; she saw that his scepticism
250 Theology in the English Poets.

was more the flight of clouds across his mind, than any
vital change in his mind itself; she went with her own
eager sympathy through all his trouble,—
Then it was—

Thanks to the bounteous Giver of all good—

That the beloved Sister in whose sight

Those days were passed, now speaking in a voice

Of sudden admonition—like a brook

That did but cross a lonely road, and now

Is seen, heard, felt, and caught at every turn,

Companion never lost through many a league—

Maintained for me a saving intercourse

With my true self——

Prelude, book xi.
she “ whispered still that brightness would return,” and
herself, loving Nature intensely, as her delightful Diary
proves, not only restored to him his ancient love of
Nature, but also opened to his heart again the foun--
tains of human love and bade him drink them and
be whole; brought him back to his real work,—
preserved him still
A Poet, made him seek beneath that name,
And that alone, his office upon earth.

It was thus he began to find his love of Man again.

But another power now joined in his sister’s work. He
had refound, as we have seen, his love of Nature, and Nature
led him now again, as she had donc of old, to the love of
Man. In his youth he had seen in her Beauty and
Sublimity ; he now, influenced by his study of Science
on the one side, and by desire to be freed from confused
opinions on the other, saw in her not only Beauty and
Sublimity but divine and quiet Order. She seemed to him
the image of right reason, the witness to calm obedience
In Wordsworth, 251

to eternal Law; she held before his eyes no disturbing
passion, but a “ temperate show of objects which endure.”
It was a view which sank deep into his troubled human
heart; he took it with him to the world of man, and it
taught kim to seek in it, beneath the wild disturbance of
the surface sea of life,—

Whate’er there is desirable and good
Of kindred permanence, unchanged in form
And function, or, through strict vicissitude
Of Life and Death, revolving.
Prelude, book xiii.

And having found these things in human life, he turned
again to Nature, and in feeling his brotherhood with
Man, felt his brotherhood with her complete. Those
“watchful thoughts’ were re-established, which had
early tutored him—

To look with feelings of fraternal love

Upon the unassuming things that hold

A silent station in this beauteous world.
Both had been fully regained—the love of Man, thie love
of Nature.

Freed thus from unregulated emotion, he sought with
quict judgment to find the great truths which underlie
human life, and the permanent feelings of human nature,
and to rest on these amid the storm of passions and
opinions, for there, among much evil, was the abiding
good in Man, the dwelling-place of God.

Thus moderated, thus composed, I found

Once more in Man an object of delight,
Of pure imagination and of love——

but it was now a wiser love; it had given up theorics of
252 Theology in the English Poets.

Man, it only sought now a humbler object—to find out what
Man was when unspoilt, through the power of a sympa-
thising human heart. And seeking thus, he recovered his
clear belief in right, his clear sight of wrong, his faith in
the eternity of pure feelings and the divine nature in the
human. Sanguine schemes, ambitious projects for the
regeneration of mankind, pleased him less; the wild
dream of promise which had flown before him in the
Revolution, “retired into its due proportion.” ‘IT sought,”
he says,—

For present good in life’s familiar face
And built thereon my hopes of good to come.

Where now was he to seek this present good, where find
the divine wealth of pure feeling and honest life of which
he was now convinced? Where, he answered, but among
the natural abodes of simple men, the men among whom
my life was passed ; thither I turn from national interests .
to individual, and perhaps in finding there personal
lives true to duty, the heart, and conscience, I may best
learn what makes the true worth and dignity of Man, and
why this glorious creature should not be counted by
thousands, not by one only in ten thousand. I will
“inspect the basis of the social pile, and ask how much
of mental power and genuine virtue they possess who live
by bodily toil,’—
therefore did I turn

To you, ye pathways and ye lonely roads ;

Sought you enriched with everything T prized,

With human kindnesses and simple joys.
There he learnt the wisdom of the Poet, the wisdom to
feel deeply and ta know things and men through love;
fn Wordsworth. p59

healing and repose came to his wounded heart as he
wandered over the moors, or sat on the cottage bench, or
by the well-spring, and talked with all he met. This was his
school, it was here he read the passions of mankind, and
the depths of the human heart, and heard—

From mouths of men obscure and lowly, truths
Replete with honour.

He sketches such a life in the character of the Pedler, in
the first book of the “Excursion,” and he drew it from him-
self. It was the life he would have chosen, and no words
can describe better than the following—a few lines being
excepted—the character of Wordsworth at this time :—

He wandered far ; much did he see of meu,
Their manners, their enjoyments, and pursuits,
Their passions and their feelings ; chiefly those
Essential and eternal in the heart,

That, ’mid the simpler forms of rural life,
Exist more simple in their elements,

And speak a plainer language. In the woods,
A lone Enthusiast, and among the fields,
Itinerant in this labour, he had passed

The better portion of his time ; and there
Spontaneously had his affections thriven
Amid the bounties of the year, the peace

And liberty of nature ; there he kept

In solitude and solitary thought

His mind in a just equipoise of love.

Serene it was, unclouded by the cares

Of ordinary life; unvexed, unwarped

By partial bondage. In his steady course,

No piteous revolutions had he felt,

No wild varieties of joy and grief.

Unoccupied by sorrow of its own,

His heart lay open ; and, by nature tuncd
And constant disposition of his thoughts

To sympathy with man, he was alive

To all that was enjoyed where’er he went,
254 Theology in the English Poets.

And all that was endured ; for, in himself
Happy, and quiet in his cheerfulness,

He had no painful pressure from without

That made him turn aside from wretchedness
With coward fears. He could afford to suffer
With those whom he saw suffer. Hence it camo
That in our best experience he was rich

And in the wisdom of our daily life.

It was thus for a time he lived, till at last, inspired by such
communion with ‘men as they are men within themselves,”
he resolved, sceing what holy worship was offered unto
God in the wayside chapels of humble and loving hearts
among poor and simple men, to make his song of these.
This then was his work, this the aim he had at last found
for his poetic life ; to—

Deal boldly with substantial things; in truth

And sanotity of passion, speak of these,

That justice may be done, obeisance paid

Where it is due : thus haply shall I teach,

Inspire, through unadulterated ears

Pour rapture, tenderness, and hope,—my themo

No other than the very heart of man,

As found among the best of those that live,

Not unexalted by religious faith,

Nor uninformed by books, good books, though few,

In Nature’s presence: thence may I select

Sorrow, that is not sorrow, but delight ;

And miserable love, that is not pain

To hear of, for the glory that redounds

Therefrom to humankind, and what we are.
Prelude, book xiii,

It was a work to which men * accomplished for com-
munion with the world, most active when they most are
eloquent,” but needing admiration to develop them, might
not care to listen. But there were oth rs who would;
men who uphold themselves, and by their own solitary
Ln Wordsworth. 255

might and joy create—others too and those chiefly found
among the walks of homely life—

men for contemplation framed
Shy and unpractised in the strife of phrase ;

who cannot speak, nor tell their secret heart, but whose

is the language of the heavens, the power,

The thought, the image and the silent joy :

Words are but under-agents in their souls ;

When they are grasping with their greatest strength

They do not breathe among them—this I speak

In gratitude to God, who feeds our hearts

For His own service ; knoweth us, loveth us,

When we are unregarded by the world.

Book xiii,

This was his work, to make unworldly men listen to the
beating of the heart of natural humanity.

And now having taken the world of humanity into
himself, the world of Nature, which he had received and
loved before, united itself to the world of humanity
within him, and the marriage of the Mind to the Universe
of which we:spoke so much was complete in Wordsworth.
He saw how Nature consecrated and made grand the
human life which was lived among her beauty and sub-
limity. He felt also that the visible world and all its
forms gave teaching and pleasure to the mind in propor-
tion as human passion worked upon them, and that, in
turn, the forms

Of Nature have a passion in themselves,

That intermingles with those works of man

To which she summons him ; although the works
Be mean, have nothing lofty of their own ;

And that the Genius of the Poet hence
256 Theology in the English Poets.

May boldly take his way among mankind
Wherever Nature leads ; that he hath stood
By Nature’s side among the men of old,
And so shall stand for ever.

And he dares to hope—

That unto him hath also been vouchsafed
An insight that in some sort he possesses,
A privilege whereby a work of his,
Proceeding from a source of untaught things,
Creative and enduring, may become
A power like one of Nature’s.
Book xiii.
Feeling, hoping thus, he looked into the world of
Nature, and felt within it a living spirit, moving unseen,
but making all its life. He looked again, and below
the surface of the world of Man he gained sight of a new
and living world also, a world ruled by those fixed laws
Whence spiritual dignity originates,
Which do both give it being and maintain
A balance, an ennobling interchange
Of action from without and from within ;

The excellence, pure function and best power
Both of the object scen and eye that sces,

Hence when these two spiritual worlds were bound toge-
ther in holy wedlock in the Poet’s heart, he could speak
_from both of them alike, and reveal the mutual action on
each other of Nature and the human mind, and his work,
issuing from such origins, not only be a creation of the
human mind, but also a Power like one of Nature’s,
speak to men, as the winds and ocean speak ; move them
as the beauty of the evening moves them; and make them
thrill, as does the thunder in the tempest, with a sense of
grandeur; soften, soothe, and bless, as the quiet of the
ln Wordsworth, 257

stars or the ripple of the water, For the Poet is the living
voice of Nature as he is the expressing voice of Man,
Profoundly, then, impressed with Man, he did not
desert his first love, Nature. He threw on her the light
and emotion he had won from knowledge of the sorrows,
passions, battles and destiny of Man, till she trembled not
only with her own emotion but with his, He saw in her~
thus infinitely sympathetic to those who loved her, and
brought the power of humanity to her—the teacher, the
guide, and yet the servant of Man, And in this light, the
intercourse he had with her was not as in boyhood a wild
passion, nor a solitary one—it had now a softer, gentler,
more enduring feeling, as if felt to a lover ora friend. She
was no longer apart from Man, but thrilled through all
her veins with sympathy for Man in good: no longer apart
from God, but a life whose life was that of God; and as
such the external master, guide and anchor of his being.
This new position of Wordsworth’s mind is, perhaps,
worth illustrating at some length from his poetry, and I
will sketch some of its phases. It appeared in the very
first Poems he published after his return from France, in
the Descriptive Sketches in 1793. In them the natural
landscape and those who lived in it were knit together, so
that Nature was conceived of as inspiriting Man, and
Man as making Nature more sublime and fair. In 1795
he illustrates in the lines written near the yew-tree on
Esthwaithe Lake the opposite state of mind—in the case of
a man so absorbed in himself as to lose the good ofthe
influences of Nature and to be separated from mankind.
In 1798, in the lines written when visiting Tintern Abbey,

the union of Man and Nature in his mind is complete.
5
258 Theology in the English Poets.

The beginning of it is a condensation of all that we have
gone through with him in the Prelude as to the education
and influences of Nature on his life. There he looks back
on what he was five years before when Nature was all in
all to him, and her forms were “a feeling and a love ”

That had no need of a remoter charm
By thought supplied, vor any interesé
Unborrowed from the eye.

Now it is different, he loves not Nature less; but mankind
and its vast interest is wedded to her; and beyond both
and yet in both, in the universe without and the mind
within himself, there is an all-pervading Divine spirit.
Well-known as they are the lines must be quoted :—

For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth ; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue, And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
OF elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting sung,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things, Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains ; and of all that we behold
From this green earth ; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half ercate,
And what perceive ; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
In Wordsworth, 259

The same position of mind, only marked with less of joy
and more of sober sadness is expressed in the latter part of
the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality.

Of the poctic result of this marriage in himself of
Nature and his human Mind I have already given an
instance in speaking of the Stanzas on the picture of
Peele Castle, and explained how the imaginative creation
of the Poem was not the result only of an impression
received from Nature, or of his own thought, but of the
blended might of both embracing to produce a child
different from both, but having something of the nature
of both. I give another instance now in the most imagi-
native of his Poems, Yew Trees. He walks in the shade
of the yews of Borrowdale, those “fraternal Four, oined
in one solemn and capacious grove,” and there flows into
his passive mind from Nature a vivid impression of gloom,
of darkness and silence. Then his mind springs into
activity, fastens on the impression, knits round it thoughts
that are similar but different, thoughts of the sacred
groves such as that where the Eumenides were worshipped,
of groves where ancient powers were seen by wandering
men, of death, of all those solemn moral powers that brood
silently over Man. At last, out of both these working
together, is born the imaginative Creation, and there rises
before his eyes an ideal grove in which the ghostly masters
of mankind meet, and sleep, and offer worship to the
Destiny that abides above them; while the mountain flood,
far, far away, as if from another world, makes music to
which they dimly listen. Nothing can be more intense
in imagination, nor is there anything more unique in
English poetry :—

52
260

In this case it was chiefly Thought alone which acted on
the images received, but for the most part in Wordsworth
the natural impressions are met by thoughts connected
with human love, and the creation which ensues in the
Poem is one which is obedient to the sympathies of Man,
and yet not forgetful of gratitude to Nature, so that both
are honoured and exalted. There is a little sonnet written
in later life, and one of his best, which illustrates the
whole method of work, and yet marks how unconsciously

Theology in the English Poets.

But worthier still of note
Are those fraternal Four of Borrowdale,
Joined in one solemn and capacious grove ;
Huge truvks ! and each particular trunk a growth
Of intertwisted fibres serpentine
Up-coiling, and inveterately convolved ;
Nor uninformed with Phantasy, and looks
That threaten the profane ;—a pillared shade,
Upon whose grassless floor of red-brown hue,
By sheddings from the pining umbrage tinged
Perennially—beneath whose sable roof
Of boughs, as if for festal purpose, decked
With unrejoicing berries—ghostly Shapes
May meet at vnoontide; Fear and trembling Hope,
Silence and Foresight; Death the Skeleton
And Time the Shadow ;—there to celebrate,
As in a natural temple scattered o’er
With altars undisturbed of mossy stone,
United worship; or in mute repose
To lie, and listen to the mountain flood
Murmuring from Glaramara’s inmost caves,

—as it was bound to be—it was followed,

XLVIIL.

Most swect it is with unuplifted eyes

To pace the ground, if path be there or pone,
While a fair region round the traveller lies
Which he forbears again to look upon ;
lu Wordsworth. 261

Pleased rather with some soft ideal scene,

The work of Fancy, or some happy tone

Of meditation, slipping in betwecn

The beauty coming and the beauty gone.

If Thought and Love desert us, from that day
Let us break off all commerce with the Muse:
With Thought and Love companions of our way,
Whate’er the senses take or may refuse,

The mind’s internal heaven shall shed her dews
Of inspiration on the humblest lay.

Finally, the last book of the Prelude has this same posi-
tion of mind towards Nature as its under-thought. It
begins by a magnificent description of the ascent of
Snowdon by night, at first in mist, and then as a light
fell upon the turf, he looked up, and lo! *

The Moon hung naked in a firmament

Of azure without cloud, and at my feet
Rested a silent sea of hoary mist.

A hundred hills their dusky backs upheaved
All over this still ocean ; and beyond,

Far, far beyond, the solid vapours stretched,
In headlands, tongues, and promontory shapes,
Into the main Atlantic, that appeared

To dwindle, and give up his majesty,

Usurped upon far as the sight could reach.

 

* T insert this passage, not that I want it particularly, but because it
is one of the finest specimens of Wordsworth’s grand style. It is as
sustained and stately as Milton, and here and there one catches the note
of Milton as in the two lines beginning, ‘‘ Not so the ethereal vault,”
but it is different from Milton’s style in the greater simplicity of diction,
in the more feminine and gliding motion of the verse, and in the want,
therefore, of the solemn chords of mingled sound and thought with
which Milton clashes in again and again in a long passage, making the
reader halt to breathe. It differs, also, considered as an illustration,
from Milton’s manner in this, that Milton uses his illustrations for the
purpose of making the thing illustrated more real to the sight, whereas
in this, one feels beforehand in reading it, that it is being prepared to
serve a moral or intellectual purpose. It is a feeling which somewhat
spoils the passage from the artistic point of view.
262 Theology in the English Poets.

Not so the ethereal vault ; encroachment none
‘Was there, nor loss ; only the inferior stars
Had disappeared, or shed a fainter light
In the clear presence of the full-orbed Moon,
Who, from her sovereign elevation, gazed
Upon the billowy ocean, as it lay
All meek and silent, save that through a rift—
Not distant from the shore whercon we stood,
A fixed, abysmal, gloomy, Lreathing-place—
Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams
Inuumerable, roaring with one voice !
Heard over earth and sea, and, in that hour,
For so it seemed, fclt by the starry heavens.
Prelude, book xiv.

Out of this vision of the night, when it was wedded to
Thought, he creates the image of a majestic intellect,
‘what in itself it is and would become.” Nature had
shadowed forth in the whole scene the emblem of such
a mind, with all its functions; and he saw, through the
power of his own soul, the ideal substance the shadow of
which lay before him. But the possibility of this inter-
action lay in the original harmony which he believed had
been established by God between the Mind of man and
the outward Universe, whereby things in the one were
certain to resemble things in the other.

On these resemblances he dwells, always working,
observe, on the same large idea. And the analogy which
he makes illustrates another part of his theory,— the
distinct and active personality of Nature. She is said to
exercise a power over the face of outward things, so that
moulded, joined, abstracted and endowed,

With interchangeable supremacy

they make men feel the life that is behind them.
In Wordsworth. 263

The power that the highest minds bear with them is
“the express resemblance” of this power that Nature
exhibits. Their mind works as if it were Nature herself,
and in’a like manner. They also send forth power from
themselves which changes, moulds, abstracts, and endows
with life the objects of sense, and the thoughts of others;
which creates new existences out of the impressions and
thoughts it receives ; the least suggestion enables them
to build up great things in Thought and Act; they are
equally willing to receive passively impressions, or to work
on them; and often when God sends to them from Nature
a new idea—something, as Wordsworth thinks, created for
them—they catch it, or are caught by its ‘inevitable mas-
tery.” It is a ceaseless play, a ceaseless interaction between
the world of their mind and that of the universe, and
both the worlds are living. The imagination of lower
minds—for of course this power of which he speaks is
imagination, imagination

Which, in truth
Is but another name for absolute power™

And clearest insight, amplitude of mind,
And Reason in ber most exalted rnood—

is enthralled by the sensible impressions, and therefore
their mind is not wedded to the universe; but in the
loftier souls, the Imagination seizes like a master on the
sensible impressions and feels through them the vivid
spiritual life in Nature; and this life united to their own
inward life quickens them

To hold fit converse with the spiritual world
And with the generations of mankind.

They pass, that is, beyond the bounds of their own mind,
and of the outward universe, into a higher world than
264 Theology in the English Poets.

either, a world which is, as it were, the child of these two
parents, but a child greater than either of its parents.

And the result of having attained this higher region is
a noble moral life, a life of liberty and blessedness.

Such minds are truly from the Deity,

For they are Powers: and hence the highest bliss

That flesh can know is theirs—the consciousness

Of Whom they are, habitually infused

Through every image and through every thought,

And all affections by communion raised

From earth to heaven, from human to divine ;

Hence endless occupation for the Soul,

Whether discursive or intuitive ;

Hence checrfulness for acts of daily life,

Emotions which best foresight need not fear,

Most worthy then of trust when most ivtense.

Hence, amid ills that vex, aud wrongs that crush

Our hearts—if here the words of Holy Writ

May with fit reverence be applied—that peace

Which passeth understanding, that repose

In moral judgments which from this pure source

Must come, or will by man be sought in vain.
Book xiv,

But the result is not only a noble moral life, but also a
deep religious one. Wordsworth brings out this by
returning a little on his past, and asking in reference
to the passage just quoted, whether he has in his own life
gained this moral freedom. It is a humbler destiny, le
answers, that he has pictured. He has had his visitations
in the solemn temples of the mountains, from carcless
youth to conscious manhood; he has been a suffering man
and suffered with mankind, but he has never tampered
with conscience, never yielded in any public hope to
selfish passions, never been enslaved by worldliness, never
allowed the tendency
In Wordsworth. 265

Of use and custom to bow down the soul

Under a growing weight of vulgar sense,

And substitute a universe of death,

For that which moves with light and life informed,

Actual, divine, and true.
It was fear and love that had done this—and here he is
referring to his boyish time—but only love at last, in
which fear was drowned; love by which “subsists all
lasting grandeur, without which we are dust;” love such
as in early spring all things feel for one another; love such
as the lover feels for her who is “his choice of all the
world;” love which soars beyond all earthly love, but which
’ contains it, the spiritual love that adoring finds its end in
God. Here, where the medieval Platonists ended,
Wordsworth ends. ‘The life he had found in his own
mind, the life he has found in the outward universe,
mingling together ‘in love and holy passion,” have led
him finally to the source of the life of both in God. The
delight of earthly passion is pitiable :—

Unless this love by a still higher love

Be hallowed, love that breathes not without awe ;

Love that adores, but on the knees of prayer,

By heaven inspired ; that frees from chains the soul,

Lifted, in union with the purest, best,

Of earth-born passions, on the wings of praise

Bearing a tribute to the Almighty’s Throne.
And then he resumes the whole of this history of his
mind. The organ of this spiritual Love is Imagination,
and it has been the ‘feeding source” of his long

labour :—
‘We have traced the stream
From the blind cavern whence is faintly heard
Its natal murmur ; followed it to light
And open day ; accompanied its course
266 Theology in the English Poets.

Among the ways of Nature, for a time

Lost sight of it bewildered and engulphed ;
Then given it greeting as if rose once more
In strength, reflecting from its placid breast
The works of man and face of human life ;
And lastly, from its progress have we drawn
Faith in life endless, the sustaining thought
Of human Being, Eternity, and God.

«

And he who has reached this point, and has the express-
ing power of the Poet, is to be the prophet of Nature
and of men, to tell them of the Manhood that is
greater than Nature ;—and the revealer in his own life
through the power of God whom he adores within him, of
amore beautiful and unworldly time, of a world where
the heart of Man may become more free and full of
purer thought. This is the duty of the Poet—this ought
to be the Poet’s life. Two passages contain it, one at the
end of the Prelude; the other at the end-of the Preface
to the Excursion. I throw them both together, and close
my lecture with them :—

Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak
A lasting inspiration, sanctified
By reason, blest by faith : what we have loved,
Others will love, and we will teach them how ;
Instruct them how the mind of man becomes
A thousand times more beautiful than the earth
On which he dwells, above this frame of things
(Which ’mid all revolution in the hopes
And fears of men, doth still remain unchanged)
In beauty exalted, as it is itself
Of quality and fabric more divine.

And if with this
Imix more lowly matter ; with the thing
Contemplated, describe the Mind and Man
Contemplating ; aud who, and what he was,
In, Wordsworth. 267

The transitory Being that beheld

This Vision ; when and where, and how ho lived ;—
Be uot this labour useless, If such theme

May sort with highest objects, then—dread Powcr !
Whose gracious favour is the primal source

Of all ilumination—may my Life

Express the image of a better time,

More wise desires, and simpler manners :— nurse
My Heart in genuine freedom :—all pure thoughts
Be with me ;—so shall thy unfailing love

Guide, and support, and cheer me to the end!”
268 Theology in the English Poets.

LECTURE XIIL

—+—

Ir was natural to Wordsworth, self-removed, as he was,
from the crowd of men and from the more everyday
interests of the world, that much of his religion should
cluster round two things; one of which was the larger
interests and vocation of the whole of mankind, and
the ideas which push forward or backward the growth
of Man; and the other,—the interests and affections
and duties that belong to the natural relations of parents
and children, brothers and sisters, friend and friend,
wife and husband. The former I have already treated
of, showing how this secluded man threw himself with
ardour into the general struggle of Man for liberty
and right, and even in his later conservatism, preserved
his vivid interest in human doings. The latter, however,
I did not touch on, and my subject this afternoon is the
religious thoughts which Wordsworth collected round the
days and life of childhood, and, in connexion with this,
his view of Immortality.

And first, whatever may have been his stated creed, he
laid aside as Poet the severer doctrine of Original Sin,
which stains the child with evil from its birth, and brings
it into the world as the child of the devil. He compares
In Wordsworth. 269

his infant daughter who makes her “sinless progress,”
through a world

By sorrow darkened and by care disturbed,

to the moon “that through gathered clouds moves rn-
touched in silver purity,”

Fair are ye both, and both are free from stain,

And instead of being far away from God, the child is

nearer to Him than the man; its first faint smiles, of

which we cannot tell the cause, are to Wordsworth—
Tranquil assurances that Heaven supports

The feeble motions of thy life, and cheerg
Thy loneliness,

And this is supported by the well-known Ode in which
we find the isolated Platonic doctrine of reminiscence,
which Wordsworth partly modificd by Christianity, To
understand that Ode, to understand hundreds of allusions
in Wordsworth’s Poems, it is necessary to have some
clear idea of this doctrine, a doctrine seriously held
by Plato throughout a great part, if not the whole,
of his philosophic life. Its proof rested on the
truth of his doctrine of abstract Ideas. These had
an eternal existence; justice, temperance, knowledge,
love, truth, and the other things of God are real exist-
ences, and are the glorious and blessed sights of Heaven,
and the divine life of the Gods is in beholding them;
they visit them day by day, and draw life and power from
their contemplation. Now the soul of each man before
it comes on earth has lived in the train of the Gods, and
gone up with them to look upon the vision of absolute
270 Theology in the English Poets.

truth, gazing with the Gods on that divine landscape
of abstract ideas which make up Eternal Being. But
it has only looked on it imperfectly; glancing at it, as
it were, over a hill; seeing it for a moment, and then
departing. At some time or other then it comes to earth
in human shape, and there its nature is threefold, It is
rational, sensual, and moral or spiritual. Then comes in
the doctrine of reminiscence. For the whole of after
existence ig spent in regaining by a series of recol-
lections, and through a continual struggle, the glorious
vision which has been lost—the vision of absolute
ideas; and the regaining of it will be entrance into
true being. Of these ideas, the only one that has any
visible form on earth is Beauty. Now, whenever we see
earthly beauty, the memory of the heavenly comes back,
faintly, but enough to excite the soul; and the germ of
the wings the soul once possessed and lost, begins at the
sight to push itself forth. It is then that the struggle
begins. The sensual soul, which Plato images as a
large, misshapen horse, of a dark colour, beholding
beauty, rushes blindly to enjoy it, and sees only and
desires only the earthliness of beauty. But the spiritual
soul, imaged as a white and immortal steed, looks beyond
the earthly beauty to the heavenly that it images—and
the intense struggle between the two is only settled
with difficulty, in those who truly aspire, by the continued
dragging back and subduing of the black horse by the
rational soul, who sides with the white horse and is
the charioteer. At last, after many efforts, the sensual
soul is wholly brought under sway, and the vision of true
beauty is reached, and with it the vision of the other noble.
Ln Wordsworth. 271

ideas of wisdom, temperance, justice, and the rest. It takes
ten thousand years, Plato thinks, before the soul can regain
the imperial Palace whence it came.

But it is not only the inward sensual desires that
dim the light, and hold back the true soul from
attaining ideas, but the world of the senses also, the
material world, hampers its efforts and confines: it,
‘The only world in which the soul can truly live, ‘is the
world of ideas; and the immortal steed is depressed
and languishes in a sensible unreal world which has
no harmony with “it, But the effort ends at last,
Again and again the vision of the eternal world, ot
the ancient glory, flashes before the soul, and recalls
the pre-existent life: at each time the soul either falls
away from ‘it or draws nearer to it; and finally in those
who -do not continue falling, the wings the soul had
once are entirely reformed, and it rises to abide among
the Gods, and daily to see the divine landscape of ‘ideas,
and to live by the sight of it, The soul re-enters eternal
life. - any

Hence, the doctrine of pre-cxistence, and that of remi-
niscence, are in Plato connected with the doctrine of
Immortality as a necessary fulfilment of the two former.
We have been once in union with absolute life ; we recall
in many lives here on earth that past, and grow gradually
into union with it; and at last having recalled it all
through effort and conquest of the animal nature, we
resume it again for ever.

This is the philosophic doctrine a portion of which.
Wordsworth modified after his own fashion in the ‘Ode
on the intimations of Immortality from recollections of
272 Theology in the English Poets,

early childhood,” He draws from it the conclusion, a con~
clusion Plato would not have drawn, that the child is
nearer to God and to the vision of glory and loveliness
than the man, Plato, on the contrary, would have made
the grown philosopher more conscious of it than the
child. But Wordsworth was really nothing of a Pla-
tonist; he only liked these ideas of pre-existence and
reminiscence, and made his own thought out of them.
Coming in childhood fresh from God, all the world
seemed to his soul—since the heavenly light still lingered
in it—

Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the brightness of a dream,

But now, as man he can see this glory no longer ; yet in the
season of May, when the heavens laugh and the earth
adorns herself with joy, he recovers something of the recol-
lections of childhood, he remembers at least that there was
a visionary gleam, a glory and a dream that now are fled,
And he explains it thus by the main ideas of the Platonic
opinion :
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar :
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home;
Heaven lies about us in our infancy |

But soon the sensible world begins to do its work and
drags us away from the vision of beauty and life. The
growing boy feels the shades of the prison-house closing
Ln Wordsworth. 273

round him—the youth travels further from it, but is still
attended by it:

At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

Even Earth herself, the kindly mother, bringing her
natural pleasures of sense and affection, of human ties,
and with no unworthy aim, lures the child away from, and
makes the man forget |

the glories he had known
And that imperial Palace whence he came.

This, you will see, may be called modified Platonism. The
next remarkable passage, however, is not Platonism, and
_ Indeed, as expressed, it runs close to nonsense. We can
only catch the main idea among expressions of the child
as the best Philosopher, the Eye among the blind, that
deaf and silent reads the eternal deep, and is haunted for
ever by the eternal mind, the mighty Prophet, the Seer
blest—over whom his Immortality broods like the Day, a
master o’er a slave—expressions which taken separately
have scarcely any recognizable meaning. By taking them
altogether, we feel rather than see that Wordsworth
intended to say, that the child, having lately come from a
perfect existence, in which he saw truth directly, and was
at home with God, retains, unknown to us, that vision—
and because he does, is the best philosopher, since he sees
at once that which we through philosophy are endeavour-
ing to reach; is the mighty prophet, because in his
actions and speech, le tells unconsciously the truths he
sees, but the sight of which we have lost; is more closely

haunted by God, more near to the immortal Life, more
?
274 Theology in the English Poets.

purely and brightly free, because he half shares in the
pre-existent life and glory out of which he has come.

The child is not conscious of this vision. He does not
know that he sees God; that he is, as he speaks, revealing
the truths of the world in which he half lives; that his
common thoughts and feclings have their beauty from his
directer sight of the glory he has left: that the glory and
beauty which he sees in the world of nature is the reflec-
tion of the glory and beauty he saw in another life—that
he himself carries with him some of that celestial light.
He knows nothing of it. But we, looking back on our
childhood, or looking at childhood itself, from an age out
which has faded the light we had, remember the light of
this vision in our own childhood, and recognise its results
and quality in children, We know that what we then felt
and now see in children, was and is divine, know it from
the bitter contrast, for

The things which we have seen we now can see no more,
We are conscious that they were, because we have lost
them.

Many of the slighter Poems of Wordsworth have this
thought as their root. He is thinking of it when he
describes the characteristics of a child of three years old,
and dwells upon her utter gladness, her self-sufficingness,
on the unexpectedness of her words and actions. For she
las companions, he would say, that we wot not of. She
is living in a world that we cannot see, and acts from
impulses derived from it of which we know nothing.
Here are the lines:

Even so, this happy Creature of herself
Is all-sufficient ; solitude to Ler
In Wordsworth. 275

Is blithe society—who fills the air
With gladness and involuntary songs,
Light are her sallies as the tripping fawn’s
Forth-startled from the fern where she lay couched
Unthought of, unexpected, as the stir
Of the soft breeze ruffling the meadow-flowers ;
Or from before it chasing wantonly
The many-coloured images imprest
Upon the bosom of a placid lake.
His sister is thinking of the same, when she speaks of
the child who is unconscious of the limits of our thoughts
of time and space:
Who, worn out with the mystery
Of time and distance, night and day,
The bonds of our humanity.
Wordsworth is thinking of the same in his little Poems
of ‘‘ We are Seven,” and in the ‘‘ Anecdote for Fathers.”
The child in the first has no idea of any severance between
earth and heaven; her dead brother and sister are still a
part of the family; death is nothing to her knowledge ;
and she speaks in saying-~We are seven—one of those
“truths which we are toiling all our lives to find,” and
the recollection of which as felt by us when a child—is an
intimation of our Immortality. In the second Poem,
Wordsworth questions his little son, as to the reason he
should like one place more than another, and drives the
boy at last into finding a reason in the existence of a
weather-cock in one place and not in the other. The
Loy had no real reason to give, and the father felt that
he had forced the child to say what was untrue. But
in the saying of it, he, unconsciously, made Wordsworth
conscious of the wrong he had done. He felt that he was

reproved, as it were, by the God in the child; and the
T2
276 Theology in the English Poets.

Poem, which is a poor one, and only interesting from our
being able to refer it to the same thought that prompted
the great Ode, closes thus :

O dearest, dearest boy, my heart

For better love would seldom yearn,
Could I but teach the hundredth part
Of what from thee I learn.

No lovelier expression of that thought exists than in the
last lines of the sonnet composed by the seaside:

Dear child! dear girl! that walkest with me here,
If thou appear untouched by solemn thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine:

Thou liest in Abraham’s bosom all the year,

And worship’st at the Temple’s inner shrine,

God being with thee when we know it not.

Still more strongly does the same thought appear in
the little Poem to Hartley Coleridge, then six years old.
The first ten lines are steeped in the philosophy of the
Ode:

O thou !| whose fancies from afar are brought,
Who of thy words dost make a mock apparel,
And fittest to unutterable thought

The breeze-like motion and the self-born carol ;
Thou faery voyager! that dost float

In such clear water that thy boat

May rather seem

To brood on air than on an earthly stream;
Suspended in a stream as clear as sky,

Where earth and heaven do make one imagery;
O blessed vision! happy child!

Thou art so exquisitely wild,

I think of thee with many fears

For what may be thy lot in future yeara.

And once more, in speaking of Presentiments, he falls
back also on this thought, and says:
In Wordsworth, 277

The tear whose source I could not guess,
The deep sigh that seemed fatherless,
Were mine in early days,

As the boy grows, this innocent unconscious life in the
cternal is more and more invaded by the outward life of
which he becomes directly conscious. His games, his
father’s love, the outward scenery of nature and of
Human life, all enthral him, and the vision grows dim
and dimmer. The conscious life of Harth replaces the
unconscious life of Heaven.

But he is not left without visitations. Nature takes
up the work, or rather the divine Life in Nature makes
itself felt again and again, and thrills the boy who has
forgotten his immortal life with a vague sense of it. In
the midst of his eager earthly life, he is suddenly checked,
the beauty or the terror or the mystery of nature touching
him fora moment. It is a sudden recalling—a shadowy
recollection of the childish glory; only it is now often
linked with fear, since it has become unknown. For an
instant he feels as if the outward world had no reality,
and is forced to make things real to him by touching them ;
it misgives him that things are as they seem; mysterious
feelings of fear beset him in solitude, as if a Presence that
he could not put by were there; he has dreams, instincts
of things greater than he can grasp, that break suddenly
in upon him in the midst of wild enjoyment, and which
make him thrill with excitement, surprise, and dread.
They come to him, he knows not how, brought by

A rainbow, a sunbeam,
A subtle smell that Spring unbinds ;

Dead pause abrupt of midnight winds,
An echo, or a dream.
278 Theology in the English Poets.

Their origin from nature we have already traced in speak-
ing of the ‘‘ Prelude.” * Certain natural impressions caused
in his brain the sense of unknown modes of being. Certain
motions of the sense made him conscious through their
ministration of a world beyond this world, of something
in him which he had lost, and suddenly remembered.
They were, he says, “gleams like the flashing of a
shield ;” that lit for an instant the mind with memory
of the ancient glory, and brought with them a touch of
subdued sadness and surprise.

Such is the thought at the root of the lines on the
boy of Winander; such is the thought which gives its
special quality to the Poem on the “ Cuckoo,” where the
far-off wandering voice of the bird made it the image of a
mystery, and woke a dim sense of mystery; to the Poem
of “ Nutting,” when in the midst of the exulting destruc-
tion that a boy delights in, a dim reproach creeps in
as if he had done harm to living things. It belongs
to many other Poems, where nature is represented as
touching into momentary consciousness of life the
sleeping forms of the ancient life of the soul before it
came on earth, as sometimes in our more common life
some slight event will bring back during the day a dream
we had dreamt, but had wholly forgotten.

These are the things which, whether coming unan-
nounced to the soul itself, or led to it by Nature,
are, when remembered in after years, powerful to put
the mind into a world different from this; to reprove,
exalt, and give light by bringing to our mind our im-
mortal birth; to support us in hours of obscure distress

* See Lectures vi. vii.
In Wordsworth. 279

by the high thought that we belong to God, and are born
to regain the truths that once we had—and they come
again and again till even in manhood we get back through
the memories of childhood to the imperial palace whence
we came.*

There is the noblest expression of all this in the
Ode:
Not for these I raise
The Song of thanks and praise,
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings ;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised :
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our secing ;

 

* In my last lecture I touched on this subject, and the passage in the

** Prelude,” book xii., which I analysed there, ought to be read along
with the Ode. I insert one passage here for comparison :

Oh! mystery of man, from what a depth

Proceed thy honours. I am lost, but see

In simple childhood something of the base

On which thy greatness stands ; but this I feel,

That from thyself it comes, that thou must give,

Else never canst receive. The days gone by

Return upon me almost from the dawn

Of life: the niding-places of man’s power

Open ; I would approach them, but they close,

I see by glimpses now ; when age comes on,

May scarcely see at all; and I would give,

While yet we may, as far as words can give,

Substance and life to what I feel, enshrining,

Such is my hope, the spirit of the Past

For future restoration,
280 Theology in the English Poets,

Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence ; truths that wake,
To perish never ;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy !
Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And sce the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

Such things grow less and less as years go on; as
middle age touches us, it is only the memory that we
have had such visions that keeps us true to our immortal
destiny; as to the visions themselves, they leave us
altogether, and the light is only the light of common day.
Still now and then the vision does arise, and it came to
Wordsworth in 1818, on an “evening of extraordinary
splendour and beauty.” He sees the wonderful effulgence
of the sun setting over hills, the silent spectacle of glory
and radiance on the earth below; and he is swept beyond
the earthly beauty to aspire to the heavenly—nay, half of
the beauty is itself of Heaven, out of the heart of the
perfect life.

Thine is the tranquil hour, purpureal Eve !
But long as godlike wish, or hope divine,
Informs my spirit: ne’er can I believe
That this magnificence is wholly thine ;
From worlds not quickcened by the Sua

A portion of the gift is won.

The mountain ridges seem a golden ladder, on which one
might ascend to heaven; ‘ wings at my shoulders seem to
In Wordsworth.

play "—the very Platonic expression—he calls on drooping
old men to come forth, and see to what fair countries they
are bound; he bids the genii wake the traveller that he
may meet the dower God gives him in such beauty.

Then comes this passage :

Such hues from their celestial Urn

Were wont to stream before mine eye,
Where’er it wandered in the morn

Of blissful infancy.

This glimpse of glory, why renewed ?

Nay, rather speak with gratitude ;

For, if a vestige of those gleams

Survived, ’twas only in my dreams.

Dread Power! whom peace and calmness serve
No less than Nature’s threatening voice,

If aught unworthy be my choice,

From Thee if I would swerve ;

Oh, let thy grace remind me of the light
Full carly lost, and fruitlessly deplored ;
Which, at this moment, on my waking sight,
Appears to shine by miracle restored ;

My soul, though yet confined to carth,
Rejoices in a second birth !

Thus, felt in childhood, often recollected, sometimes
renewed in middle age, he prays in another place that
his old age may keep to its latest breath, these visions of
the soul, these dreams of an immortal life; that he may
rejoice, with quickened spirit, in the admonitions of God’s
voice given in the quiet of the heart, or suddenly flashing
on him from Nature—till he feel secure of life in God,
and pray the prayer of one whose immortality is sure.

Breathe through my soul the blessing of Thy grace:

Glad through a perfect love, a faith sincere,
Drawn from the wisdom that begins with fear,
Glad to expand, and, for a season, free

From finite cares, to rest absorbed in Thee.
282 Theology in the English Poets.

This is the growth of the faith in Immortality. Direct
vision of the eternal world and life in it, during infancy—
recollection of the glories of that vision when the world
has hidden it from our eyes; frequently repeated recol-
lections, all leading us back to the heavenly life and
accustoming us to trust in it—sudden outbursts of
actual vision such as childhood possessed, when moved by
some splendid sight or inspired act; rarely coming, but
when assisted by the recollections intensely convincing—
quiet philosophic faith in the intuitions of the soul that
tell of eternal life, so that
though nothing can bring back the hour
OF splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower ;

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind ;

In the primal sympathy

Which having been must ever be ;

In the soothing thoughts that spring

Out of human suffering ;

In the faith that looks through death,

In ycars that bring the philosophic mind.

Then, as the old man looks back, he sees that his wish
has been fulfilled ; the same divine remembrance of beauty
that made his heart leap up when he beheld a rainbow in
the sky is with him still. That which was his as boy, has
been his as man, is his, now that he is old. The child has
been Father of the man, his days have been “ knit each to
each in natural piety.” The piety is the piety of immortal
hopes; the old man’s vision of the future life is co-
incident with the child’s vision of the pre-existent life. Age
is not desolate then. The unutterable dewy light of joy is
gone, it rests no longer on Man or Nature. But the love
which has come of suffering, the long union with the
In Wordsworth. 283

human heart, the sad but hope-lit experience, do not
' make him love Nature less than when he tripped as lightly
‘as the brooks that fret their channels, but more; he can
still enjoy the innocent brightness of a new-born day; the
beauty of all things is not less, but more, because touched
with the sentiment of mortal sorrow and mortal victory ;
they take a sober, but not less lively colouring; and the
meanest flower that blows, to a heart so trained, leads him
beyond itself to live in the eternal, in the land where men
weep not for either joy or sorrow, for the thoughts that
are there are too deep for tears.

Abiding then in old age we look back to our childhood.
We were nearer then to the divine life, and there the
soul recognises most clearly its immortal features :

Ah! why in age

Do we revert so fondly to the walks

OF childhood—but that there the Soul discerns

The dear memorial footsteps unimpaired

Of her own native vigour; thence can hear

Reverberations ; and a choral song,

Commingling with the incense that ascerds,

Undaunted, toward the imperishable heavens,

From her own lonely altar ?
We look forward also, that we may see the life to come, the
resurrection of that we once possessed; we have not really
lost, but gained, by age, if we have been true to the divine
gleams that we could not wholly lose. Old age is then
great—raised above the thraldom of the passions that
beset guilt, the ambitious worldliness which made the
light such common day, the very world of sense that made
us forget our ancient spiritual Home,

Rightly it is said
That Man descends into the Vale of years ;
Yet have I thought that we might also speak,
284

Theology in the English Poets.

And not presumptuously, I trust, of Age,

As of a final Eminence ; though bare

In aspect and forbidding, yet a point

On which ’tis not impossible to sit

In awful sovereignty ; a place of power,

A throne, that may be likened unto his,

Who, in some placid day of summer, looks
Down from a mountain-top,—say one of those
High peaks that bound the vale where now we are,
Faint, and diminished to the gazing eye,

Forest and field, and hill and dale appear,
With all the shapes over their surface spread :
But, while the gross and visible frame of things
Relinquishes its hold upon the sense,

Yea almost on the Mind herself, and seems

All unsubstantialized, —how loud the voice

Of waters, with invigorated peal

Yrom the full river in the vale below,
Ascending? For on that superior height

Who sits, is disencumbered from the press

Of near obstructions, and is privileged

To breathe in solitude, above the host

Of ever-humming insccts, ’mid thin air

That suits not them. The murmur of the leaves,
Many and idle, visits not his ear;

This he is freed from, and from thousand notes
(Not less unceasing, not less vain than these, )
By which the finer passages of sense

Are occupied ; and the Soul, that would inclino
To listen, is prevented or deterred.

And may it not be hoped, that, placed by age
In like removal, tranquil though severe,
We are not so removed for utter loss ;
But for some favour, suited to our need?
What more than that the severing should confer
Fresh power to commune with the invisible world,
And hear the mighty stream of tendency
Uttering, for elevation of our thought,
A clear sonorous voice, inaudible
To the vast multitude, whose doom it is
To run the giddy round of vain delight,
Or fret and lahour on the Plain below,

Excursion, book ix.
Ln Wordsworth. 285

It was in this faith that Wordsworth lived and died. It
was in deep belief in God and Immortality, and in a
Saviour from sin, that he passed his quiet days, and found
peace far from the strifes of men. It was in the calm—
alike removed from stormy passion, and from the disturb
ing lusts of the world—that this faith gave him, that he
wrought out and lived the high morality which he has
given to us in the ‘ Ode to Duty,” in the fine strain of the
“Happy Warrior,” and in many noble passages in the
“Excursion.” It was in this faith that he quietly reposed
in his domestic life, and by it enhanced all: the faithful
affection for wife and sister, children and brother, that
nowhere in English poetry burns with a lovelier or a purer
light. As age grew on, his calm deepened, he had “the
silent thoughts that search for steadfast light; he
wished, and realised the wish, to present to God his life
as a “pure oblation of divine tranquillity.” Nor was he
without joy in the midst of calm; there was no stagnant
water in the deep lake of his heart; such poems as the
‘Ode to Duty ”’ and others are filled with a resolute and
exalted joy ; and there were times when, as the old man
prayed, his delight was transfigured :

I bent before Thy gracious throne,
And asked for peace on suppliaut knee,
And peace was given—nor peace alone,
But faith sublimed to ecstasy.

Nor can I better close these lectures upon him than by the
sonnet in which he looks back and looks forward in a strain,
where clear knowledge of what Man is in himself alone, is
mingled with quiet faith in what he is in God.
286

Theology in the English Poets.

AFTER-THOUGHT.

I thought of Thee, my partner and my guide,

As being past away.—Vain sympathies !

For, backward, Duddon! as I cast my eyes,

I see what was, and is, and will abide ;

Still glides the Stream, and shall for ever glide ;
The Form remains, the Function never dies ;
While we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise,
We Men, who in our morn of youth defied

The elements, must vanish ;—be it so !

Enough, if something from our hands have power
To live, and act, and serve the future hour ;

And if, as toward the silent tomb we go,
Through love, through hope, and faith’s transcendent dower,
We feel that we are greater than we know.
ln Robert Burns, 287

LECTURE XIV.

=
ROBERT BURNS.

When speaking at the beginning of these lectures of
theology in the earlier poets of the Natural School, in
Cowper and Crabbe who preceded the great outbreak of
song, I omitted Robert Burns. I now fill up that
gap, which was left for a sufficiently good reason—that
though the influences which came on Nngland at that
time did have their result upon Burns, they had far
less result than on others, because he was essentially
the creation of his own land, and of another poetic
descent than that of England. With regard to the
poetry of Nature, he only carried on in a more vivid
and tender way, and on precisely the same lines, the
same sort of natural description which had been worked
by the Scottish poets from the time they began to
write. With regard to what I have called, along with
others, the poetry of Man, he was less universal and more
national than the English poets who followed him. But
when we look at his work on this subject, and compare
it with that of the English poets who preceded him, or
with that of his contemporaries, Cowper and Crabbe, we
find in him a peculiar quality which gives him a distinct
288 Theology in the English Poets.

rank in the history of English poetry, of which I may
as well speak in this connection. He restored passion
to our poetry. It had not belonged to it since the days
of Elizabeth. No one would guess, who began to read
our poetic literature shortly after the death of Shake-
speare, how rich the veins of nature and emotion had
been in our country. He might read through the whole
of our poetry, with the exception of a few songs and
sonnets, down to Burns, and not find any poetry which
could truly be called passionate. So, when the fire broke
out again in Burns, it was like a new revelation; men
were swept back to the age of Elizabeth, and heard again,
though in different chords, the music which had then
enchanted the world. And since his time, our poetry has
not only been the poetry of Man and of Nature, but also
of Passion. And it sprang clean and clear out of the
natural soil of a wild heath, not out of a cultivated
garden ; it was underived from other poets, for Burns
read nothing but a collection of English songs; it was
unassisted by the general culture of a literary class, for
it was born when he was reaping in the fields, and when
he held the handles of the plough; it came direct ont of
a fresh stratuza of popular life. It was as if the Muse
had said, Iam weary of philosophy and satire, weary of
faded sentiment, of refined and classic verse, and of stern
pictures of misery, and I will have something fresh, at
last; and had driven a shaft down through layer after
layer of dry clay, till she touched far below, a source
of new and hidden waters, that, loosened from their
prison, rushed upwards to the surface, and ran away a
mountain torrent of clear bright verse, living and life-
Ln Robert Burns. 289

giving. Burns added passion to the poetry of Nature
and Man.

But independent of the poetry that has to do with these
two subjects, and the theology of which I shall speak of in
this lecture and the following, there is in Burns a poetry
of personality. On this, in its religious aspect, I shall
speak in my third lecture.

Our subject to-day is the Poetry of Man from a theo-
logical point of view, as we find it represented in Burns.

The poetry of Man began distinctly in England with
the first coming to the light of the ideas of the Revo-
lution. Before the great singers came we can trace
these ideas in English poetry, and I have traced them
in Cowper and Crabbe. They appear also in Burns, but
in by no means so full a form. They influenced him
insensibly ; he does not recognise their power. But in
one point he was consciously at one with them, in their
claim that the poor should be thought of as men; in
the placing of Man—apart from all consideration of caste
and rank and wealth and race—foremost. How far he
was touched by this, and ‘how far it was specially modified
in him, we have now to consider, and it is part of our
subject, for it either flowed directly from a new and larger
idea of God, or was creative of a larger view of Him.

He was born in 1759, and the first edition of his poems
was in 1786. His first work and his youth preceded then
the outbreak of the Revolution. We cannot therefore say
that he was revolutionised, but he was a born revolu-
tionist, in the sense of being ready, when he thought it
needed, to take the part of his own class against selfish
rank and wealth; and to appeal for his right to do this

Tv
290 Theology in the English Poets.

to the common duties and rights of man as man. Not
in Cowper, not in Crabbe, not in any of the after Poets,
was the deep cry of the Revolution more clearly heard
than in the whole of the fine song—

Is there, for honest poverty,
That hangs his head, and a’ that?
The coward slave, we pass him by,
We dare be poor for a’ that!
For a’ that, and a’ that,
Our toils obscure, and a’ that ;
The rank is but the guinea stamp,
The man’s the gowd for a’ that.

Being thus himself poor, “ following his plough along
the mountain side,” and having in him, not discontent
with his poverty, but a heart framed to enjoy and love
all beauty, and to feel all that was human, and being
insensibly influenced by the spirit of the time, he
threw into tender and humourous song the sorrows and
affections of his own class, their religion and their
passions, their amusements and their toil, till all the
world Jaughed and wept with Ayrshire plonghmen. As
in England, so in Scotland, we now find something better
than the distant sentimental view which we found the
Poets took of the poor. Burns did in 1786 the work
which Crabbe began in England in 1783 and Cowper in
1785. Mark the dates—how they all run together—
And I have often wondered in looking at these lines of
Gray’s, which Burns put as motto to the “ Cottar’s Satur-
day Night ”—

Let not ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys and destiny obscure ;

Nor grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short but simple annals of the Poor—
In Robert Burns. 291

whether he recognized in them the note of distance, and
meant to make his own vivid, lifelike description of a poor
man’s home, a contrast to the fine-gentleman sentiment
of Gray.

One would think so from the Preface and the after-
dedication to his Poems ;—the passages are interesting
and bear upon the present question.

‘The following trifles are not the production of the Poet who with a
the advantages of learned art, and, perhaps, amid the elegances and
idlenesses of upper life, looks down for a rural theme, with an eye to
Theocritus or Virgil. ‘To the author of this, these, and other celebrated
names their countrymen are, at least in their original language, a foun-
tain shut up and a book sealed. Unacquainted with the necessary
requisites for commencing poet by rule, he sings the-sentiments and

manners he felt and saw in himself and his rustic compeers around him,
in his and their native language.”

And in the Dedication—

“The Poetic Genius of my country found me, as the prophetic bard
Elijah did Elisha—at the Plough, and threw her inspiring Mantle over
me. She bade me sing the loves, the joys, the rural scenes and rural
pleasures of my native tongue: I tuned my wild, artless notes as she
inspired.”

At home then, among the poor, he gave them his best
work, and it was done, as all the highest work is done,
with passion.

In the movement of thought and feeling towards the
recognition of the poor and working men as sons of God,
and as made of one blood with the rich and learned, there
was as yet no natural passion. Cowper and Crabbe, though
their sympathy with the lower class was deep, spoke for it
and of it, not out of it; and naturally there was no per-

sonal passion in their work, They led men to feel with the
ua
292 Theology in the English Poets.

poor, but it was as men feel with the sorrows and joys of
a different race. But when Burns came, it was a different
business. I have said that he restored passion to our
poetry. He brought it now into this movement. He
added its fire to the work which Cowper and Crabbe
had done, and threw around poor life and rural nature,
for the first time for centuries, ‘the light that never
was on sea or land.” When he spoke, whether to
ostlers at the inns, or to ‘jewelled duchesses,” as
Carlyle calls them, or to literary men in Edinburgh,
they one and all felt his fire, and believed that rustic
hind and milk-maid, field labourer and beggar, were of
like passions with themselves, were just as good and just
as wicked, and in the same way, as they were themselves.
They recognised the truth when it was told with a passion
that was born directly out of the life of poverty and
labour, and they said,—These, then, are men and women,
not shadows any longer: bone of our bone and flesh of
our flesh.

The same passion ran through all he said and did.
No one felt more keenly than Burns that tingling of
the heart, which at its height produces poetry of word
and deed. In that which men ordinarily call Love, we
are told that his agitation exceeded anything his friend
had ever seen; but of that Ido not speak. His emotion
was as great, though not so disturbing, in ali the other
spheres of emotion. Who has not felt the intense thrill
of passion in the lines on ‘Mary in Heaven,” in
“Mary Morison?”’ and hearken to this, in which he
describes that which most pleased him in the Songs
of Lapraik—
In Robert Burns, 293

There was ae sovg amang the rest ;

Aboon them a’, it pleased me best,

That some kind husband had addrest
To some sweet wife :

It thrilled the heartstrings through the breast
A’ to the life.

And his only wish was not to produce finespun emo-
tion, or to write to please the critics, but to touch the

heart.
Gie me ae spark of Nature's fire,
That’s a’ the learning I desire ;
Then though I drudge thro’ dirt and miro,
At plough or cart ;
My Muse, though hamely in attire,
May touch the heart.

And so it has done. Even the wildest pieccs of mad
humour like “Tam o’ Shanter” or the “Jolly Beggars ”
have so much of intense humanity in them, that they
move natural emotion, and reconcile us even to coarseness
for the moment. We feel that men are kindly, even in
their ill: though I must speak afterwards of the bad
results of Burns’ victory over the ascetic party in Scotland.

But whatever the ill results, this bright, tender,
heartfelt representation of the life of the poor, not only
brought the rich and comfortable near to the poor and
struggling, and placed both on the common platform of
humanity: but it also made the poor themselves con-
tented and in love with life, by bringing out the nobility
and beauty of the simple human passions, and of the com-
mon working life of men. Even in the sharp contrast
which he draws in the “ Twa Dogs” between the lives of
poor and rich, he himself prefers that of the poor, and
gives clear reasons for it—reasons which had their
204 Theology in the English Poets,

root in no sentimental view of the question. Ile
was then no mcre wild revolutionist; he did not wish
to level all. He preached a crusade against the selfish-
ness of the rich, but he did not wish the poor to be-
come as the rich. Keep to your own life, he said to
them; learn to live it, to live truly and honestly in it—
to recognise in it the dignity of Man, to rejoice in its
hardy independence, in its simple but deep emotions.

Nor was all this without a religious basis. It was
connected in the mind of Burns with the thought of
God as the Father of the Poor, of God as even the
universal Father before whom each man stood, stripped of
wealth, of rank, of outward show—acharacter alone. And
this God, in the Poet’s mind, was Love, and the source of
all Love wasin Him. It was impossible then for Burns
to hold the strong Calvinistic view of the reprobation of
the greater part of mankind. He was continually in
antagonism with it, and many and shrewd were the blows
he dealt it. To him, as well as to Shelley and Byron,
we owe much of our freedom from this inconsiderate view
of God, a view which only could have been born in a
socicty that was rooted in an aristocratic view of the
world, though strange to say, yet explicable enough if one
had time to go into the matter, it has been the favourite
religion of democracy. As to Burns, his deep con-
ception of the univcrsal power of God’s love, led him
to pity the Devil and to hope for his redemption, a hope
that many who still believe in the Devil share with him.

Ye aiblins might—I dinna ken,
Hae yet a stake.

On the other side, God’s love for Man would make Him
In Robert Burns. 295

indignant with those who oppressed the weak or injured
the poor. And the Poems of Burns are full of this indig-
nation. Not all the rage of winds and biting frost are
more unkind, he says, than the miseries

That heaven-illumined man on brother man bestows.

All his religion, he says, came from the heart; and
it drove him, when he thought of his poor people and
their hard lives, and how beautiful they often were with
natural feeling ; when he thought how much they suffered
and how much was due to them, to refer the origin of
their good to God, and to leave the righting of their
wrongs to God.

He went further, and threw over the lives of the poor
the light of God. Every one knows the scene in the
‘‘ Cottar’s Saturday Night;” every one has felt how
solemn and patriarchal it is, and how all the charming
gossip and pleasant human fun, and modest love which
charm us in it are dignified by the worship of God that
follows. But that poem must not be taken as represent-
ing the religious feeling of Burns; it is purposely made
religious; and all we can truly say of Burns is, that
whether as regards his own art, or when he speaks of the
lives and love of the poor, he was one of those men who at
the end of last century claimed for men a universal Father
in God, and vindicated the poor as His children. It is not
of course stated directly—that would not be the way of
a Poet,—but it is a spirit in his work, and it flows through
all his graver poems. It affects also distantly all his
poetry, and owing to its influence, we find the grace and
tenderness of human feeling used to make beautiful that
296 Theology in the English Poets.

which the world calls common, even that it calls unclean.
This is, indeed, the most sacred work of poetry, and
it has so strict an analogy with the means Christ chose
to use in His teaching, that it forms another point of
union between Christianity and poetry. I have often
said that if we would understand Christ’s words and
works, we must approach them as we approach poetry.
The Parables that have to do with Man are poems, in
which the common lives and sorrows of men are made
divine by interpreting them as symbols of God’s relation
to men. The world can never forget the Shepherd seek-
ing his sheep, the Father’s joy over his son lost and found,
the blessing given to the children, the life the Saviour
lived among the outcasts and strayed of earth, the glory
of love which was shed over the fisher’s life, the way
in which the whole of humble working life was linked to
God, the proclamation of the care of the Highest for the
shepherd on the hill, for the sower in the field.

And whatever one may have afterwards to say of Burns’
religion, the practical result of much of his poetry in his
age was to do similar work to that of Christ—to exalt
and beautify the life of the poor, to make them feel that
they were cared for and known of God.

It was then, in this way, by upholding Manhood as first,
and by exalting the poor as men, and by preaching a com-
mon brotherhood, that Burns developed the poetry of Man,
and was a child of the ideas of the revolution. But there
was another human element in his poetry which I must
speak of now—his strong nationality. It was connected
with theology, and it was unconnected with the revolution.
One of the main ideas of the revolution was its rejection
In Robert Burns. 297

of all nationalities for the sake of mankind. It proclaimed
one country of which all men were citizens, one nation of
which all men were members, of which all men were
patriots, to which all men were bound to offer up their
lives. A man was not, in the first instance, an English-
man, Frenchman, or Italian, he wasaman. Its tendency
was then to repress any strong feeling of nationality, and
to substitute for it a strong Humanity. And we have
found that element in the poets in England who were
most influenced by the revolution. We do not find it
in Burns. Nor is it likely that we should; for if love of
Nature is one of the distinguishing elements of all Scot-
tish poetry, love of Scotland is the other, and Burns is
the descendant of the one as well as of the other.

It seems to be doubted both by Burns and Carlyle
that Scotland was fond of herself till Burns arose—by
Burns in lines to W. Simpson which I shall quote after-
wards; by Carlyle when he speaks of the remarkable in-
crease of nationality in Scotch literature, and attributes it
chiefly to Burns. Both of them scem to forget, or not to
know, that the poetry of Scotland has never failed to be
national, even after the union of the two crowns, the
time of which they speak. The Lowland poetry began
in Scotland with James I, and took its first inspiration
‘from Chaucer, whom James had read while a prisoner
in England. But the remarkable thing is, that while
it retained the manner of Chaucer, it kept none of
his spirit. It was not English, nor even medieval,
It became entirely Scotch in spirit; it employed itself
on Scotch subjects; and whatever form it took up, ballad,
or fable, or pastoral, or allegory, it gave them all a special
298 Theology in the English Poets.

Scotch turn. And one of its characteristics is a devotional
patriotism. Ballad after ballad records it, and when we
come to the greater Makers, it is intense. Dunbar’s
‘‘Golden Terge” is one instance; Douglas brims over
with it; even Lyndsay, before he was carried away from
purely poetic work to political, gives himself to glorify his
land. Again, at a time when personification raged in
Scottish poetry, one of the most frequent personifications
is that of Scotland herself. She appears as Warden of the
Land, in a noble song of Alexander Scot’s, full of a manly
freedom and patriotism: and it is patriotism whose main
desire is not for warlike glory, but for the glory which
belongs to a nobly-governed country whose citizens were
free from falsehood, flattery, and impurity. Or, as in
Dunbar’s “Thistle and Rose,” life is given to the Royal
Arms, and the animals and flowers sing the glory of the
land. The same strong feeling, and in this short sketch
I can give you no idea of its strength, is continued
through Ramsay and Ferguson and a number of minor
pocts, right down to Burns, whose “ Vision ” and “ Scots
wha hae wi’ Wallace bled” are the legitimate children
of this long patriotic passion. A flood of Scottish pre-
judice, he says, has been poured along my veins, and I
feel it will boil there till the flood-gates shut in eternal

rest.

The roughbur thistle spreading wide
Amang the bearded hear,

I turned the weeder clips aside

An’ spared the symbol dear.

Tn nearly all his poems we find this traditional nationality,
and it entirely prevented him from receiving the dena-
tionalising idea of the revolution. All the characteristics
In Robert Buris. 299

of the past poets belong to him. He keeps himself through-
out to Scottish subjects; his scenery is entirely Scottish, his
love of liberty concentrates itself round Scottish struggles ;
his muse is wholly untravelled ; and while it gains a certain
strength within its sphere from this limitation, it loses
that breadth of view and depth of passion which belong
to the greater poets. He may have, as Carlyle says, a
resonance in his bosom for every note of human feeling—
and he has—but all the human feeling is Scottish. There
is no need to account for this; the reasons are plain in
his position and his life. Nor have we any need to regret
it, for if Burns had been more universal we should have
lost him; he could not have built a loftier rhyme than
his own rustic national one, and he knew that well. When
the Muse of Scotland appeared to him, she bade him sing
his own people ; ‘her mantle was adorned with the rivers,
hills, and boroughs of Scotland, and in her face was the
character of Scotland’s poets—

A hair-brained, sentimental trace,

Was strongly marked in her face ;

A wildly witty, rustic grace

Shone full upon her ;

Tier eye, e’vn turned on empty space,
Beamed keen with Honour.

And the same “ wildly witty, rustic grace” that shone
full upon her shines in all his work. For Scotland’s
glory and Scotland’s beauty

1 kittle up my rustic reed
It gies me ease.

And nothing can be better or brighter than the lines in
which he expresses this, written to W. Simpson,
300 Theology in the English Poets,

Ramsay an’ famous Ferguson,

Gied Forth au’ Tay a lift aboon ;

Yarrow an’ Tweed to monie a tune,
Owre Scotland rings,

While Irwin, Lugar, Ayr an’ Doon,
Naebody sings.

The Ilissus, Tiber, Thames an’ Seine,
Glide sweet iv monie a tunefw’ line!
But, Willie set your fit to mine,
An’ cock your crest:
We'll gar our streams an’ burnies shine
Up wi’ the best.

We'll sing auld Coila’s plains and fells,
Her moors red-brown wi’ heather bells,
Her banks an’ braes, her dens an’ dells,
Where glorious Wallace
Aft bure the gree, as story tells,
Frae Southron billies.

At Wallace’ name, what Scottish blood
Put boils up in a spring-tide flood ?
Oft have our fearless fathers strode
By Wallace’ side:
Still pressing onwards, red-wat-shod,
Or glorious dy’d.

And this profound patriotism had, in that religious
country, where religion lies deeper among the peasantry
than anywhere else, where the strife of religion has becn
violent in proportion to the feeling that it was a matter
of life and death, its root in God. God was claimed as
the source of patriotism ; it was He that made men love
their country, he who inspired those who warred for its
liberty. I might quote passage after passage from
Douglas, from Dunbar, from Sir D. Lyndsay, from the
others; but let Burns himself answer the call—Burns,
whose “ warmest wish to heaven was sent” for his dear,
his native soil.
Ln Robert Burns, 301

O Thou ! who poured the patriotic tide

That streamed through Wallace’s undaunted heart ;
Who dared to, nobly, stem tyrannic pride,

Or nobly die, the second glorious part, —

The patriot's God, peculiarly thou art,

His friend, inspirer, guardian, and reward—

O never, never, Scotia’s realm desert ;

But still the patriot, and the patriot bard,

To bright succession raise, her ornament and guard!

In these days, when we think less of a national and
more of a universal God, it may strike us as limiting and
dividing a great idea to speak of a patriot’s God. And,
when we consider well, there is a great disadvantage in
thinking of a God whose peculiar care is England, or
France, or Germany ; indeed, if we do so, in war for ex-
ample, our idea of God must become wholly confused,
One or other side must be wrong in claiming God as spe-
cially theirs. God is the God of mankind; His equal
love belongs to and falls on all, on the meanest as fully as
on the most cultured races. That is the large conception
which will free us from the national selfishness into which
patriotism degenerates, and increase that international
kindness and communion which are beginning to be a
mark of our time; nay more, bring us slowly up to the
thought which a century hence will, I hope, dominate
politics—national self-sacrifice. The Christian thought of
personal life is to surrender our personal life and its
interests for those among whom we live. The Christian
thought of social life is to surrender our personal interest
for the sake of the well-being of society, not only of our
own country’s society, but of human society. The Christian
thought of national life, which has been prominently put
forward by the Comtists, is that each nation, when the
302 Theology in the English Poets.

interests of the whole race are concerned in such sacrifice,
should give up its national interests for those of all man-
. kind. Till we attain that, and it will necessitate a gencral .
confederation of nations, we cannot be called Christian
nations, for we are not regulating our national conduct by
the Christian rule of life.

Keeping, however, this thought of God clear as the
foundation of our life, we are then able—without ill or un-
reason following from it—to love God as the God of our
country also, as the source of a noble patriotism. Forwe
no longer think of God as the God of England in rivalry
or contest with other nations, and claim Him as specially
ours to the exclusion of others. We say to ourselves, on
the contrary—“‘ Our country has a special work to do in
the progress of the wholerace; work which is fitted to our
national character, and which our special gifts enable us
to do better than any other nation. It is God who in his
education of the whole of mankind has given us that
work. Within its sphere, then, and with this object before
us, which is first universal, and afterwards national,
God is the source of our patriotism.” We love our
country then in God, when we love it for a higher reason
than its own glory—for the reason that it is the instrument
of God to do a special work for Man. We support and
cherish the peculiar characteristics of England, because
these are needful for the growth of mankind. We love
and cherish its scenery because that is one of the most
formative elements of our national character, and that
character is needed for the growth of Man. We are
patriots because we are men who believe that the decay
or death of England would damage the interests of the
In Robert Burns. 303

whole race, and delay its progress to the great goal
whither God is driving it.

And nothing is lost in that idea of the old power and
dearness of patriotism. The old conception is taken up
into the new, only all the evil of national selfishness is
taken out of it. We love our country none the less
because we love man more.
304 Theology in the English Poets.

LECTURE XV.

—e—-

In my last lecture I spoke of the poetry of Man as
found in Burns, and I dwelt especially on the way in
which he—in accordance with the new spirit which was
stealing into the world—devoted his work to the interests
of the poor among whom he lived, not of set purpose
like a philanthropist, but because he could not help it
like an artist.

It is his natural poetry of which I shall speak to-day,
and we can connect it with the previous lecture by the
thought that among the joys that God has given to the
life of the poor one of the deepest is the beauty of
Nature, and the heart to love it; such a heart as Burns
himself possessed, who

‘Tn his glory and his joy
“ Followed the plough along the mountain side.”

Things without money or without price, beauty not hid in
galleries, but spread abroad a feast of delight on every
mountain-side and stream-fed meadow—this was God’s
gift to the poor. And strange to say, Burns seems to
think, and he should know something about it, that the
poor were better able than the rich and cultured to enjoy the
In Robert Burns. 305

loveliness of the world. That certainly would not be true
of England now; for there are few things we have so
attentively cultivated as the love of Nature. But it may
have been true in his days that

The Laverock shuns the palace gay,

And o’er the cottage sings ;

For Nature smiles as sweet, I ween,
To shepherds as to Kings.

Wordsworth, too, takes up the same thought ; he himself
is formed by Nature, step by step ; it never seems to occur
to him that his companions—dalesmen, shepherds, ped-
lers, even the little children—can be otherwise than
lovers of Nature, and able to enjoy its beauty; and
we must take his witness as true, for he lived among
them all his life. But this is certainly not the case
further south, and the lower one goes in England, the
less one finds of it, except in the upper classes, among
whom it has now become almost instinctive.

We have, then, this curious problem at the very outset
of our lecture—that the poor of the north-western part
of England on the border, and of the west border of
Scotland, are lovers of Nature, while the poor of midland
and southern England are not. I do not say that I can
solve that problem; I cannot—but I can make a few
conjectures about it, and it will lead me to speak of the
Nature poetry of Scotland, a poetry so distinct from that
of England that it is necessary to say something about it
before we touch on it in Burns.

The higher appreciation of Nature among the men of
the west border may partly be owing to the grandeur or

wildness of the scenery they live amongst. The imaginas
%
306 Theology in the English Poets.

tion cannot help being awakened and impressed by deso-
lation. Fear ig easily stirred in boyhood by the storm on
the moor, or the majesty of mountain loneliness, and fear
awakes imagination. Afterwards, when with manhood
comes courage, fear passes into a sense of the sublime,
and terror has its beauty, since it stirs emotion. But
when perception of the sublime exists, perception of the
beautiful in the peace of nature soon follows: the one
throws the perceiver into the arms of the other. That
may be one explanation, but it is not a sufficient one.
It does not account for this love of Nature among the
dwellers in the quiet scenery of Ayr and Lanark.
Therefore I cannot help conjecturing that a great deal of
the intense perception of Nature’s beauty which we find in
early Scottish poetry—especially the wild love of colour—
the descriptions of Gawin Douglas blaze like an Oriental
monarch—may be due to some far-off admixture of Celtic
blood. All the Scotch poets of early date possess it, and
it seems to spring out of nothing. There is no cause for
it in the influence which Chaucer and his school had on
poetry in Scotland, for it does not exist among them;
nor in the French, for there it does not exist at this early
time of which I speak, except, indeed, where one gets a
touch of ‘Celtic influence. In the absence of any real
cause that I can absolutely point to, J am forced to con-
jecture that this love of nature was a legacy left by the
Celtic blood among the English of the Lowlands. The old
Kingdom of Strathclyde ran up from our present Wales to
the Clyde, taking in the half of the Lowlands and the
more western parts of Northern England. The Celtic
Poets liad this intimate desire to. look at Nature, this
In Robert Buris. 307

passion for colour, this wish to glorify the woods and
streams, which is so remarkable in Douglas and the rest.
They take, as the Scottish Poets do, isolated natural
objects—a rock, a tree, a glade—fall in love with them,
and bring them with one magical touch into the domain
of Fairyland. Their early literature, their romances,
their songs are full of this. There is nothing of it in
early English poetry. A few distant echoes of it are heard
in Shakespeare, but scarcely any true notes of it in Eng-
land, till Keats and Shelley and Tennyson. In Scotland,
we find it at once, not at all in its perfection, but suffi-
ciently distinct to sever Scotch poetry from all others of
the time, and to make it of a different race from English.

Now my conjecture is, that this Celtic element of natural
love of the beauty of the world, this special power of seeing
Nature, and delight in observing her—which came so early
to Scotland, and so late to England—crept in from Strath-
clyde, mingled in the blood of the English of the Lowlands,
and left behind it, when the Celtic race died away, its
peculiar note in the Lowland mind. Any way, this is true,
that Scotland has always been a land where Poets loved
Nature, and that she first sent that love down to England.

The original impulse of the Lowland poetry came, as
we have seen, from Chaucer through James the First.
We might then expect that its natural description, with
which we have now to do, would retain some of the pecu-
liarities of Chaucer's landscape. That is not the case.
The intense nationality of the Scotch of which I have
already spoken, seized on this element in poetry, and at
onee and for ever put aside the conventional landscape

of Chaucer. The Scottish poets could not realize smooth
x2
308 Theology in the English Poets.

and soft meadows and fair gardens, and trees standing so
many feet apart. There was nothing of the kind in Scot-
land. Their own scenery forced itself on their notice,
and they loved it well. In all the poems, the trees, rocks,
rivers, and valleys, are distinctly Scotch; the sun rises in
Scotland, the months and seasons as described by Douglas
have the character of his own country. We may say that
the law which bids a poet describe what lies before him,
and write with his eye on the object, in distinction from
that which insists on the landscape being always made
up of certain stock properties, is due to the Scottish Poets.
In England it did not prevail till Cowper’s time—in
Scotland, it was carried out, owing to the love of her
people for their own country, before the seventeenth
century. It is a curious anticipation by many years of
the love of Nature for her own sake which was first
rooted in our literature by Wordsworth.

With regard to the description of nature itself, it is
absolutely unique at the time. It is perfectly amazing
to find, in the sixteenth century, im Scotland, elaborate
natural description full of close touches of reality, over-
laden with colour, minute, enthusiastic, at a time when
nothing of the kind existed, or had existed in England.
Here and there it is touched by the convention of Chaucer,
as in the use of Latin names for the sun—a survival
which we find.in Burns—but the feeling for Nature of
Douglas and Dunbar, and their natural description, are
not only unlike anything that had ever been in England,
they remain unlike anything which prevailed in England
down to the very end of the eighteenth century. The only
man in whom we miss this minute, observant, patient effort
In Robert Burns. 309

to represent Nature as she is, is Drummond—and he was
not of the Scottish line—he was Elizabethanized. The
whole thing is a curious literary problem, and one of the
conclusions to be drawn from it, is this—that we owe
our special natural poetry to an impulse received from
Scotland. It is not too much to say that the first touches
of love of Nature in Pope’s time which we find in Gay
were due to the influence on him of his friend Ramsay’s
poems. Neither is it strange to find that he who broke
away from the tea-tray landscape of Pope, and was: the
first poet in England who painted Nature directly, was
Thomson, a Scotchman, who came to London with the
MS. of his “Winter” in his pocket. He started the
impulse which ended in the natural poetry of Words-
worth, Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson, but he drew himself
the impulse from a long line of Scottish ancestors who
had loved and described Nature.

This is the ancestry of the natural poetry of Burns, If
we except the extraordinary love of colour which is one of
the characteristic marks of the early Scotch poets, he has
the same intense love of Nature and accuracy of descrip-
tion that they possessed. In two things, however, he differs
from a man like Douglas. First, his range is not so wide.
There was nothing Douglas saw which he did not de-
scribe—I might even say catalogue, for the things are
put down one after another without any power of artistic
combination—but there are only certain things which
strike Burns. In fact they come in so often and are
so nearly always the same, that a certain amount of
conventionality prevails in his natural descriptions. It
is the ordinary Lowland scenery on the borders of the
310 Theology in the English Poets.

hills ; milk-white thorns, corn-fields, running rivers under
birchen shade, the singing of birds, sheep wandering
on the hills, heather and its flowers, streams in spate,
and certain conditions of the sea—with a special love
for spring and winter—winter being always a favourite
of the Scottish poets. He does not get far beyond this
range, and it is, as I said, narrow. But within the
range, it is exquisitely trne and tender, the sentiment of
it is perfect, it is never exaggerated, nothing is forced or
over-dwelt on; it is the natural and swift reproduction in
words of the landscape, and all that is said sounds sweetly
and smells sweetly to the sense.

Secondly, his natural description arises out of a deep
and natural love of Nature, but it is never alone as that
of Douglas was, never without the element of humanity.
In a delightful passage, when the genius of Scotland’s
muse speaks to him in vision, Burns expresses his early
passion for natural beauty.

I saw thee seek the sounding shore,

Delighted with the dashing roar ;

Or when the North his fleecy store
Drove through the sky,

I saw grim Nature's visage hoar
Strike thy young cye.

Or when the deep green-mautled earth
Warm cherished every flow’ret’s birth,
And joy and music pouring forth

In every grove,
I saw thee eye the gen’ral mirth

With boundless love,

Nature, too, was bound up with his art: it was she who
gave it half its fire, she who thrilled him often with so
In Robert Burns. aiT

much emotion that he broke into poetry, she who was
mingled up with all his love and sorrow in humanity.
The Muse nae Poet ever found her,
*Till by himsel’ he learned to wander
Adown some trotting burn’s meander
An’ no think lang:
O sweet to stray and pensive ponder
A heartfelt song—

and there is not a song of his which has not its back-
ground of tender landscape. But strong as this love of
Nature was in Burns, it never wholly absorbed him. He
could not, like Wordsworth or Shelley or Keats, sit down
in a wood or on a hill-side and describe what he saw, for
the love of it alone, without a thought of humanity, with-
out a thought of self, absolutely lost in love of the world.
His natural descriptions are always the background for
human figures, for human love or sorrow or mirth. Man
is always first in Burns; and he either wholly subordinates
Nature to humanity, or he uses it as illustrative of human
life. I take the lines to the “ Lass of Ballochmyle.”

*Twas even, the dewy fields were green:
On every blade the pearlis hung,

The zephyrs wautoned round the bean
And bore its fragrant scents along.

In every glen the mavis sang,

All Nature listening seemed the while,
Except where greenwood echoes rang
Amang the braes of Ballochmyle—
With careless step I onward strayed,
My heart rejoiced in Nature’s joy.

That is complete enough. Wordsworth would have left
it there, Burns cannot—over the braes he brings a
maiden—
312 Theology in the Enghsh Poets.

Perfection whispered, passing by,

Behold the lass of Ballochmyle.
Tt is the same in the two well-known poems of ‘ Mary in
Heaven,” and the “ Banks of Doon,’”’—his landscape is
always, not for itself, but for the human feeling with
which he links it; and where the feeling is most deep, the
landscape is most lovely.

This humanization of landscape is the transition step
between a poetry like Pope’s which has Man only as its
subject and rejects Nature, and such poetry as much of
Wordsworth’s, in which Nature assumes the first place.
It was made in England by such men as Gray and
Collins, in whose work, if you remember, nature is moral-
ized for man’s sake, while it is described with a certain
affection. Burns, who carefully read Gray, represents in
Scotland such a stand-point, only that it is there not in
progress to a future, but in retrogression from a past poetry
of. Nature; and also, the landscape is not moralized by
Burns, but made passionate with love.

He mingled Man and Nature together, and in doing so
he transfers the depth of his personal affections to natural
objects, and speaks of them with often a sudden tender-
ness, an exquisite mournfulness of pity, or a quick sym-
pathy with their joy. His address to the daisy makes one
feel for it as if it were a beautiful child too rudely treated.

Wee, modest crimson-tipped flower,

Thou’s met me in an evil hour,

For I maun crush amang the stoure
Thy slender stem.

To spare thee now is past my powcr,
Thou bonie gem.

But even here he cannot, as Wordsworth does, leave the
Ln Robert Burns. “19

daisy and its fate alone. He is driven to compare it with
helpless maid and luckless Bard—and finally with him-

self— Ev’n thou who mournst the Daisy's fate,
That fate is thine—no distant date ;
Stern Ruin’s ploughshare drives, elate,
Full on thy bloom,
Till crushed beneath the furrow’s weight
Shall be thy doom.

The same quick, simple tenderness went to animals. One
sees how Burns loved birds in almost every song. He
was a hater of field sports ; and even when in driving his
plough he turned up the field mouse’s nest, he could not
bear the sorrow he was causing; he enters into all the
pain and wants of the little thing as if it were a child, till
he feels that the mouse is his companion and that he has
harmed a fellow-creature.

I'm truly sorry Man’s dominion

Has broken Nature’s social union,

An’ justifies the ill opinion,

Which makcs thee startle,

At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An’ fellow mortal !

But here, again, he cannot help, like Gray, moralizing,
nor in the end getting back to himself.

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,

In proving foresight may be vain :

The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft a-gley,

Av’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promised joy.

Still thou art blest, compared wi’ me,
The present only toucheth thee.
But, Och ! I backward cast my e’e

On prospects drear |
An’ forward, tho’ I can na see,

I guess an’ fear,
314 Theology in the English Poets.

Take one more example, which combines this tenderness
of pathos towards the animal creation with ono or two of
his vivid natural touches of storm.

I thought me on the ourie cattle,

Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle
Of wintry war,

Or through the drift, deep-lairing sprattle,
Beneath a scaur.

Dk happing bird, wee helpless thing,
That in the merry months of spring
Delighted me to hear thee sing,
What comes o’ thee ?
Where wilt thou cower thy chittering wing
And close thy ee ?

As to the theology in all this love of nature, there is
not much of it. Burns had no special philosophy any
more than Keats about the relation of God to nature.
He adopted the old simple view of God as the Creator
and sustainer of the universe that the stern religion of
Scotland had taught his fathers. But the poet’s love of
all things was so strong in him that he added to that
idea the thought of God as the lover of the universe he
had made and supported. And the love that God had for
the universe was reflected in the breast of Burns, and so
wrought that when he was most full of it, he drew nearest
to God. It was a love which had no wild tempest of passion
in it, which did not strive or cryin his heart. In it he did
not “feel his pulse’s maddening play,” nor was he hurled
blindly into wrong. Therefore, all the depth of his
nature found in it peace which had no fierce reaction;
and an uplifting of heart which was freed from over-
driven excitement, and pure. It was when nature was
most softly fair, or when it was sublime that Burns drew
Ln Robert Burns. 315

‘nearest to God. He has recorded this himself in a kind
of preface to one of his poems.

‘“ There is scarcely any earthly object gives me more—
I do not know if I should call it pleasure—but something
which exalts me, something which raptures me—than to
walk in the sheltered side of a wood or high plantation in
a cloudy winter day, and hear the stormy wind howling
among the trees, and raving over the plain. It is my
best season for devotion: my mind is wrapt up in a kind
of enthusiasm to Him, who in the pompous language of
the Hebrew bard, ‘ walks on the wings of the wind.’ ”

In such a sentence we see Burns lifted for one moment
into that imaginative but dark piety which the Cove-
nanter had, and which was largely derived from the
solemn and terrible aspects of the mountains and storms
he often lived among. But such piety will often be as
gloomy and cruel as the climate, and link to itself’ a super-
stition passionate and dark with fear in inferior men, stern
and unrelenting in stronger men. From this Burns was
freed by the tenderness of his heart, which made him,
when he was devotional, love and not fear God; and the
terror and gloom of nature—never very great in the
Lowlands—did not make him stern to others, nor alas !
stern to himself. His love of Nature then did not lead
him to that practical love of God which shows itself in
doing for love’s sake what is right.

It is the case of many : love of Nature often goes with
a character gifted or sometimes cursed with an intense
power of sympathy which shrinks from putting itself in
action; with strong passions which are not controlled by
will; with a joyousness and a power of sorrow which
316 Theology in the English Poets,

carry the man beyond himself into a region where
neither piety nor morality exists, and where he becomes.
of the same temper as Arie] or Puck, so that if either a
call of duty then comes, or a temptation, he will be
likely to ignore the first, or fall into the latter. In such
a state there is no conscience. We sce and feel, and
no more; we do not think of acting. This was espe-.
cially the case with Burns.

Has then the love of Nature no religious power? Is it
better to be without it? I cannot think so, Those who
do not feel it, who see and love no beauty, may be moral,
but they will never reach the nobler enthusiasms of
religion: their religion itself will be without the
loveliness axid tenderness which attract the soul, and
their theology more intellectual than spiritual in its
statements. Moreover Ruskin is quite right when he
says, “that supposing all circumstances otherwise the
same with respect to two individuals, the one who loves
Nature most will always be found to have more faith in
God than the other.” For far more fully than in erring
man, are certain grand qualities of God revealed in Nature,
righteousness, order, justice, peace, omnipotence, bene-
ficence, judgment. It is strange, I think, how much
this knowledge of God through His works, and _ its
natural influence in producing faith, has been neglected
in religious teaching, when one remembers that the whole
of the Old Testament is full of it. All the Hebrew
Poets were profound lovers of Nature, but of Nature
seen as the revelation of God’s character. When God
wishes to convince Job of his unalterable goodness and
justice, He makes the whole of Nature and its wonders
In Robert Burns. 317

pass before him. He gives him no theological or pious
teaching, but out of the whirlwind asks, Hast thou
considered, &c., &c. Through the whole range of the poets
who speak in the Psalms, the same spirit is felt. The
hundredth and fourth Psalm is almost a kosmos, but it
begins with the source and power of all—with God.
The angels are God’s messengers to direct the forces of
Nature. Nature herself is the image of God, his pos-
session and his voice. A hundred texts occur to us.
The sea is His and He made it, and the strength of the
hills is His also. His righteousness is like the great
mountains, His judgments as the deep. In wisdom did
He make His manifold works, and He himself rejoices
in them. The heavens declare His justice, and His
glory; and listen to this, Ps. Ixv. v. 5—13.

By terrible things in righteousness wilt thou answer us, O God of our
salvation; who art the confidence of all the ends of the earth, and of
them that are afar off upon the sea:

Which by his strength setteth fast the mountains; being girded with
power:

Which stilleth the noise of the seas, the noise of their waves, and the
tumult of the people.

They also that dwell in the uttermost parts are afraid at thy tokens :
thou makest the outgoings of the morning and evening to rejoice.

Thou visitest the earth and watered it; thou greatly enrichest it
with the river of God, which is full of water: thou preparest them corn,
when thou hast so provided for it.

Thou waterest the ridges thereof abundantly : thou settlest the fur-
rows thereof; thou makest it soft with showers; thou blessest the
springing thereof.

Thou crownest the year with thy goodness; and thy paths drop
fatness,

They drop upon the pastures of the wilderness; and the little hills
rejoice on every side.

The pastures are clothed with flocks ; the valleys also are coveyed over
with corn ; they shout for joy, they also sing.
318 Theology in the English Poets.

No one wants to take away the work of Science, the
result of which among cultivated men is by deepening
the observation of Nature to increase the love of it; but
we want to add to it this old Hebrew notion of a Divine
Life and Character within it; and this ought to be the
work of the Poets, whose business it is to give vitality to
things. For if we are left to contemplate a dead world,
as much as modern scicnce leaves us to do, the true love
of Nature—that which exalts and makes tender—will
slowly die away; we cannot long give affection to that
which we conceive as lifeless. If we would love Nature
well, we must find Life in it: and when we find its Life
in finding God pervading it, then love of Nature leads
to faith in God.

It is true, little of this is found in the New Testament.
The Apostles were so overwhelmed with their special
practical work, and so overtaken with the multiplicity of
it, that it is no wonder we find nothing of their life with
Nature, or of Nature as revealing God. But that does
not say that it did not exist in them; and it probably
did, if they were influenced deeply by the teaching of
Christ. For there alone in the New Testament is this
love of Nature scen as leading to love of God, is Nature
used as revealing God. He himself, as I have often said,
has made plain in his life how dear to Him was the
beauty of the world. He loved to wander by the lake,
among the corn, and on the grassy hills. He marked the
aspects of the sky, the growth of trees, and the beauty of
flowers. He loved animals, and drew some of his love-
liest teaching from their ways. When weary, he sought
the hill-top by night; when uplifted by strong communion,
In Robert Burns. 319

the higher ridges of Hermon ; when exceeding sorrowful,
the Jonely olive grove.

And his teaching lays the whole of Nature under con-
tribution. He makes Nature a parable of which God in
His relations to man is an interpretation.’ The ways of
the sun and wind and rain, of the grass and flowers, of
the cornfield, the fig-tree and the vine, were all taken
up into the religion that He taught. He bid us seek the
Heavenly Father, not only in the words and life in which
He manifested God, but in the book of the common
things of earth and air. And he who walks with Christ
through the world may feel that the love of Nature is
religious.

Still more connected with a moral life, and with one
which prepares the soul for God, are the same tenderness
and love when they are felt for animals. JI have already
said that no Poet ever more deeply felt the sorrows of
created things than Burns, nor stronger anger against
their slaughter for sport. The “Wounded Hare” will
live in men’s memories when hares are no longer shot for
sport. To him horses, dogs, birds, the dwellers on the
moors and in the grass were friends. When Mailie died

He lost a friend and neeber dear
In Mailie dead.

That is the feeling which marks civilization. The savage
must slay for life and life’s support; the half-civilized
man carries out the practice of the savage without his
excuse; and it is the characteristic of that class of ours,
which one of our own day has called the barbarian class,
to find amusement in slaying, It is of course a remnant
320 Theology in the English Poets.

of barbarism, and it is obliged to be kept up by laws
which bear hard on the poor, for the sake of the sport of
the rich. Before an advancing civilization such laws as
the game laws, and such barbarisms as keeping whole
tracts of country desert for the sake of game, must
perish.

There is no doubt in my mind, that however amusing
and however manly such sports may be, they are harden-
ing to the heart; and they set men apart from the
nobler thoughts and tenderer feelings of life, not alto-
gether, but up to a certain point. They are cruel, and
the indulgence of cruelty, however it may be condoned
by society, barbarizes it. And so far as it is cruel and
accustoms to cruelty, it separates men from God and
from love; and that it is unconscious cruelty and is not
felt as such by the conscience, does not make the matter
better, but worse. One of the things then that our
Christianity has to get rid of, is the destruction of life for
the sake of sport; of all sports which bring with them
needless suffering of animals and needless irritation of
men. The whole thing is a part of that aristocratic element
which lingers still among us, but is passing to its fall.

Every Poet then, who like Burns, increases that larger
tenderness of the heart which not only loves men, but
hates to give pain te the lower animals, is, so far at least,
religious in his poetry. And nearly all our later Poets
have done this sacred work, and have made it a part of
their theology. Their device has been the device of Oole-
ridge,

He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast,
Ln Robert Burns. 321

LECTURE XVI.

SS

I wave spent two Sunday afternoons in speaking of
the poetry of Man and of Nature and of the theology in
them, as represented in the work of Burns. Our subject
to-day is concerned with some aspects of his life so far as
they bear on the personal religion that appears in his
poetry, and with his relation as a Poet to a special form
of theology.

We have seen how well and manfully, when he was
young, he accepted his place as a poor man, and how he
honoured Poverty by song. But his poverty did uot
guard him against the temptations which besct his artist
nature. He had but little power of Will when his pas-
sions were excited, and whether it was love, or fame, or
the pleasures of the table, he was swept away by all alike.
The natural result of this course of life, combined with
want of Will, was that he never set himself to any
ordered music, never adopted or pursued any end with
any perseverance. These elements in his character were
developed into unfortunate prominence by his visit tc
Edinburgh. He was taken out of his natural atmosphere,
and though he kept his independence, and retained his

free nature, his life was spoilt by the change. His frank-.
x
322 Theology in the English Poets,

ness and andacious personality made him unwelcome to
those who had lionized him at first, and he was gradually
dropped. And when he was put aside he did not like it,
and he could never breathe easily again the air of humble
life. It was a severe trial. A few weeks before he was
flying from his country, an exile and in despair, and now
he was at the summit of the wave of Society, his name
in every mouth. A few weeks later and the whole pageant
had dissolved. He was back again in a small country
place, discharging the most unpoetical of offices. He
took the glory and the fall with equal good temper and
manliness, though they both intensified his errors. He
was not dazzled at Edinburgh into believing that his
fortune was made. He knew that he was too bold and
rough to win patronage, and he went home to fulfil
his duties as an exciseman, the only place that Society
could find to employ the genius of Burns. It was like
Society ; and yet, though we are indignant, it would be
unfair to lay all the blame of the Poet’s life on the neglect
of Society. If Burns had been a little nobler in character,
with some self-restraint, some purposefulness in life, he
might have been happy and written his poems, as an excise-
man. But he could not; passions, appetites, and irregular
excitement carried far beyond what he could bear, soon
ruined his life. He had gained a taste for fame, and he was
continually invaded by persons who led him away from
his work. His fashionable life produced results which
brought him to an early death. It stimulated the fatal
qualities of his nature; it spoilt the unity of his life by
fixing one end ofits axis among the rich and another among
the poor, and if threw him into the worst company—the
In Robert Burns. 423

company of the lionizers of genius, who seek it to be amused
and then mock at the source of their amusement. It was,
no doubt, his own fault that he perished; but it would have
been well, if the big people had let him alone, or at least,
if they who flattered him had done something better for
him than set him to catch smugglers. It is all well
summed up in Carlyle’s ‘“ Lectures on Heroes;” in a
delightful passage, which I remember being told by one
who heard it, was closed exactly as it is in the book—
Carlyle pronouncing with inimitable meaning in his voice
the last word ‘“‘ But”—and then rapidly passing behind
the curtain of the platform.

“ Richter says, in the island of Sumatra there is a kind
of Light-chafers—large fireflies—which people stick on
spits and illuminate the ways with at night. Persons
of condition can thus travel with a pleasant radiance,
which they much admire. Great honour to the fire-flies !
But ieee

Ido not think I ever see fine and fashionable people
“taking up” a poor artist, or making a show in their
drawing-rooms of a struggling genius—and trying, in
their blind, barbarian way, to help him on,—especially
when they demand that the artist should submit his indi-
viduality to their caprices—without a desire to say to
him—For God’s sake, bear any poverty rather than yield
to this. They do not mean badly, but they have no
intelligence to mean better; and their tender mercies will
kill your powers. You may not be Samson, but it is
bitter to make sport for the Philistines. It degrades the
intellect and corrodes the heart.

There were two things, then, in his life which spoiled
¥ 2

 

 
324 Theology in the English Poets,

him. Want of aim was one; and unrestrained passion.
was the other; and both characterize one type of the-
artist, the second or rather the third-rate type. In the
highest artist, the aim of his life is clear, and he never
fails to see it and to labour for it. His passion also,
which he must possess, is always in his power. He may
choose to indulge it, but he does so purposely, and he can
check it when he will with ease; but he rarely chooses
to indulge it to the prejudice of his art, whatever that
art may be. For the sake of his art, he wills to be.
temperate and he is; and while enjoying all things to
the very top of enjoyment, he is always capable of staying
his hand at the point where enjoyment threatens to pass
into satiety.

Burns had neither of these qualities. “The great
misfortune of my life,” he says, “was to want an aim:”
and bitterly he regrets it in hours. when solemn thought
was uppermost. The note he strikes at the end of his
“ Address to the Field Mouse” is still more plainly heard
in the “ Ode to Despondency,”—

Happy, ye sous of busy life,

Who, equal to the bustling strifo,

No other view regard !

T’en when the wished end’s deny’d,

Yet while the busy means are ply’d,
They bring their own reward :

Whilst I, a hope-abandoned wight,
Unfitted with an aim,

Meet every sad returning night
Aud joyless morn the same,

At other times—and how characteristic this is of such
a nature—he accepts his aimlessness as a good thing, or
at least, as something which cannot be helped, .and is to
Ln Robert Burns. aoe

be made the best of. He is in good spirits, his mood is
happy, and he contrasts his thoughtless and wild enjoy-
ment with the miserable state of those that live by rule,
whose hearts are never touched by impulse :—

For me, an aim I never fash ;
I rhyme for fun,
* * * * *
Tll wander on, wi’ tentlcss heed
How never-halting moments speed,
Till fate shall snap the brittle thread,
Then, all unknown,
T’ll lay me with th’ inglorious dead,
Forgot and gone!
But why o’ death begin a tale?
Just now we're living, sound an’ hale ;
Then top and maintop crowd the sail,
Heave Care o’er sido!
And large, before Enjoyment’s gale,
Let’s tak the tide.
* * * * *
An anxious e’e I never throws
Behiut my lug, or by my nose ;
I jouk bencath Misfortune’s blows
As weel’s I may:
Sworn foe to Sorrow, Care, and Prose,
I rhyme away.

‘

And then he turns upon those whose life he half despises,
and at times half regrets :—
O, ye douce folk, that live by rule,
Grave, tideless-blooded, calm, and cool.
Compared wi’ you—O fool! fool! fool!
How much unlike ;
Your hearts are just a standing pool,
: Your lives a dyke !
I have no special fondness for over-purpose in life, for
living by rule. The common advice—find one aim, and
pursue it to the exclusion of all others, is good worldly
326 Theology in the English Poets.

advice, but that is not always the best. He who allows
everything else to be absorbed in the pursuit of one
aim will probably succeed in his aim, and be called by
the world the most prudent and intelligent of men.
He may be prudent, but he will scarcely be intelligent.
For he will become a man of only one thought, and all
those parts of his nature which he cannot bring into
activity round his special thonght, will become dead for
want of use. He will not, and he cannot grow. It is
better to be like Burns than to be one of that type.

But if the aim you propose to yourself be one of
those which, because they are ideal, seek their food from
every quarter, and claim as helpers the powers of heart,
spirit, and brain; if it allow not only of enjoyment
and growth through variety of interests, but also of
wise passiveness and healthy idleness; and yet is itself
so pure and high as to prevent passiveness from pro-
ducing sloth, and activity from degenerating into a
disease—then to have a clear aim is absolutely right,
and man, in fact, cannot achieve greatness in life, or
worthiness within, unless he have it. But if he has such
an aim, its very essential difference is, that it sets its
possessor free from the slavery of over labour; that it
takes him out of the class of the ‘ douce folk who live by
tule.” And the great artist possesses it: Burns did not.

The other lesson of the life of Burns, is that of the
evil of unrestrained passion. I do not use the word in
the sense of the passion of love, though that was the
special frailty of Burns ; but of all deep emotion, whether
arising from appetite, or sense, or the vision of ideas. In
this large sense, it is not passion itself which is harmful ;
Ln Robert Burns. 327

nay, as I have often said, nothing can be done well without
emotion ; nothing perfectly without intense emotion. The
cold-hearted folk, however practical, have no powerful
influence on the world. And in all art, it is absolutely
necessary. ‘‘Put your passion into it,” says Keats;
and he gives in that phrase the first principle of art.
We have already seen that because Burns possessed this
quality, he poured new life blood into English poetry.
And all that was best in the man and his poetry came
out of it :—his spirit of universal kindness, his indigna-
tion at wrong, his inability to cringe, his insight into
nature, his love of animals, his vivid entrance into, and
his glorifying of common life, his deep religious feeling
towards Him whose very self was Love—nay, we owe
to it even the goodness in his badness, the touch of wild
self-sacrifice, of a higher love than the sensuous love in
his sins, which did not redeem them, but made them
more capable of pardon, more open to repentance than
those sins of self which do not. shock society. Nor was
he unaware of this himself, and he has said it with his
own special force :-—

I saw thy pulse’s maddening play
Wild send thee Pleasure’s devious way,
Misled by Fancy’s meteor ray,

By Passion driven :
But yet the light that led astray

Was light from Heaven,

You see, he does not deceive himself, for Burns had
ene of the noblest qualities a man can possess—entire
sincerity with himself; it never occurred to him to be
untrue. Though the light of Heaven was in the affection,

yet, through his own fault of will, it led him astray,
328 Theology in the English Poets.

There was no will towards Right strong enough to check
the rushing tide of enjoyment. Impulse and its gratifica-
tion took the moment and became its master. Whether
it was the pleasure of society, or the appetite for drink,
or the passion of love, or the fire of indignation, it was
all the same; he was swept away into their extreme: and
of course became in turn the prey of dark despondency,
of torturing remorse, of religious gloom, of the evils of
over-indulged satire.

He ran the course so many run. Having no restraint
of self, he sank into satiety, and the misery of satiety
seeks a new excitement or new phases of the old—till
excitement becomes the only food of life. But there is
a limit to excitements. The time comes when either
no more exist or we have exhausted all our powers of
enjoyment. Then come the tyranny and the punishment.
We again seek the old excitement, driven by its lash,
but when we drain the cup which once was pleasure, it
is pain. The “crime of sense is avenged by sense that
wears with time.” It is that very torture which the
medizval poets invented for the avaricious—molten gold
poured down their throats; our enjoyments have become
red-hot and burn our life away; nor, worst of all, can
we get rid of them —we must drink them though we
abhor them.

Enjoyment is a necessity of life, and its morning air,
It is equally vain and wicked to lessen or decry it, for
we have not half enough of it. But it is a shameful
thing when men, not ruling it with temperance, degrade
it in the eyes of others by making it equivalent to satiety.
Enjoy then; but keep the beauty of enjoyment by self-
In Robert Burns. 329

restraint in it; and then I venture to say—though there
are those so utterly base as to restrain themselves in
vicious enjoyment that they may keep the pleasures of
sin longer—that your enjoyments will on the whole keep
pure, that there will not be much in them which will
offend the eye of God, that they will serve your growth,
and give you power to do all your work in a stronger
and finer manner.

Again, wanting all will in passion, Burns wanted,
when under its dominion, the sense of right and wrong.
In the hour of excited feeling he was willing to let
everything go—Law, Honour, Conscience, and Religion.
Nothing remained but his passion; and it was right, and
everything that stood in its way, wrong. It made its
own wrong and right, and. as usual the two became
inextricably mixed together—for apart from the moral
question, it is the oddest thing in all such states of
feeling that there is often really a touch of right in the
wrongness, and a shade of wrong in the rightness that
we feel.

But it is not a good thing when the conscience gets
puzzled; and when it gets altogether confounded, as it
sometimes does, and goes, wearied out, to sleep, and
leaves passion to have its own way—not only is much sin
done, but this also happens—all the charm and good of
passionate feeling dies or begins to die.

I wave the quantum of the sin,
The hazard of concealing,

But och ! it hardens a’ within,
And petrifies the feeling.

There is no enduringness in passion of any kind when
330 Theology in the English Poets.

it deliberately drugs the conscience. For the conscience
wakes out of its heavy sleep when the day of excitement has
passed by, and wakes up so angry that it lets in remorse,
and remorse is an ill companion. It does not heal, it so
mauls the soul that the memory of the excitement becomes
poisonous. And it finally ends by bringing on the reck-
less indulgence which is hated while it is going on,
and which adds, when exhaustion comes, another bitter
element to the curse of satiety. The glory and delight of
true passion are destroyed, and the man ends as Burns
ended, in a ruined and wasted life. ‘The wind bloweth
over him and he is gone, and the place of him knoweth
him no more.” This is the lesson of the life of Burns.
He knew it himself. He puts it at the close of the
epitaph he wrote for himself.

Reader, attend !—whether thy soul
Soars fancy’s flights beyond the pole,
Or darkling grubs this earthly hole,
In low pursuit :
Know— prudent, cautious, self-control
Is wisdom’s root.

Yes! and enjoyment’s root also; though I should take
exception to the words “ prudent” and “ cautious.”
For no life can be perfect which is overmastered by either
prudence or caution.

Again, the special theological turn which some of his
poems took, arose out of this unbridled passionateness.
For their strong opposition to Calvinism was more the
result of anger at the penance the kirk imposed on him
for open sin than of any religious zeal. He seized on the
patent objections to the doctrines of reprobation, effectual
Liu Robert Burns. 331

calling and the rest, and used them as stalking horses for
his avenging satire; and the bitter feud which existed on
these doctrinal subjects between MacGill and Dalrymple,
the two ministers of the town of Ayr, supplied him with
all the opportunity he wanted. His first satirical poem,
“The Holy Tulzie” (quarrel), ridiculed a quarrel
between two ministers, Moodie and Russel, on ‘“ effec-
tual calling,” and delighted the opponents of Cal-
vinism. It was followed by ‘ Holy Willie’s Prayer,” the
most ferocious blow that was ever dealt at the ugly side
of Calvinism—over ferocious, as usual with Burns, to do
any really good work against it; and so full of coarseness
and wild irreverence that it only shows how high religious
rancour ran among the clergy when these elements in it
were condoned by one side for the sake of the occasion it
gave them against their enemies.

It is true that Burns, in his wiser moments, would
always have been a foe to the extreme Calvinistic doc-
trines, on the ground that he felt, being a lover of all
things himself, that they made God into a Demon of
Selfishness. His heart, like Shelley’s, hated and denied
that dreadful theology. But he never saw the good or the
poetry which underlie its ideas, and his attack on it was
just as much, if not more, caused by the natural reaction of
the Bohemian nature against the ascetic type of Calvinism.
Of that type he found two forms: one the stern, righteous
asceticism, which condemned all gaiety as unworthy
of an immortal soul; which secluded the religious man
wholly from all worldly things as in themselves profane;
which chastised with the utmost severity of word and
deed all sin, and especially the sins of passion ; and which
242 Theology in the English Poets.

lived up to this standard truthfully ;—the other the sham
asceticism—a type Calvinism is sure to produce by its
unnatural strictness—the crime of men who, wearing the
mask of a stern religion, in secret indulged in all kinds
of wickedness, and then fell back on their election by
God to eternal life to free them from fear, and to enable
them to sin at their ease.

Against the first Burns proclaimed the doctrine of a
more liberal religion, and claimed the right of enjoyment;
and so far he was right. But he could no more put limits
to the statement of this than he could put limits to his
own practice of it, and the statement went so far as to con-
done immorality of every kind. Conviviality was glorified,
drunkenness was exalted into an excellence, illicit love was
made poctical, and in the delight of the reaction from the
over-strictuess of Calvinism, which the poems of Burns
encouraged, the whole tone of morality in Scotland was
lowered; and in nothing more than in the frightful impulse
given to a hospitality which insisted on the canonization
of drunkenness, and made the pleasures of the table the
true impulse of art and song. We trace this even in
the works of a man like Wilson, whose ‘‘ Noctes” are
deformed by it.

Whatever thanks then we may owe to Burns for his
exposure of the ghastly side of Calvinism, must be
largely modified by the evil he did in the way he exposed
it. Itis a bad thing to expel an evil opinion by an evil
practice, and though it sounds like a paradox, it is not
so uncommon.

Against the second, that is, the sham asceticism which
was acloak of sin, the indignation of Burns was righteous,
Ln Robert Burns. 333

We cannot but rejoice at the way in which he flayed
alive William Fisher, the Holy Willie of the Poem, a
leading elder, “a great pretender to sanctity, austere of
speech,” and rigid in observance. He died drunk in a
ditch, and his life was as immoral as his death was vile.
But the besetting sin of want of self-restraint is as
visible here as in the former case. Burns was over-
mastered by his impulse to satire as he was by his
impulse to indulge appetite. In attacking hypocrisy; he
was swept away to impute hypocrisy to nearly all who
lived a strict life or were severe in speech or manners.
In condemning uncharitableness he became himself un-:
charitable.

A free life which loses love to the unloving, is on the
point of drifting into that temper in which liberty is made
the servant of uncharitableness; and that freedom is not
freedom which is bound to be abusive. Burns often had
no mercy on unmercifulness, and it often wants it as
much as frailty. Nothing can be better than his address
to the unco guid or rigidly righteous; these lines that I
read are steeped in the spirit of Christianity,—

Then gently scan your brother Man,
Still gentler sister Woman ;

Though they may gang a kennin wrang,
To step aside is human :

One point must still be greatly dark,
The moving Why they do it ;

And just as lamely can ye mark,
How far perhaps they rue it.

Who made the heart, ’tis He alone
Decidedly.can try us,

He knows each chord its various tone,
Each spring its various bias :
334 Theology tn the English Poets.

Then at the balance let’s be mute,
We never can adjust it;

What’s done we partly may compute,
But know not what's resisted.

But he forgot, and indeed it is the hardest thing Charity
has to remember, that the unco guid are often as much
the victims of circumstances as the weakly sinful. They
are born, many of them, with as much of the milk of
human kindness in them as others, but their education—
their sect and its restrictions, the severity of their parents,
the whole atmosphere of gloom and terror which their
religion gives them to breathe—have crushed all tender-
ness and mercy out of them, and when they come to be
men and women, they have stones for hearts. And they
are intensely disagreeable and often shamefully cruel.
But, if they are not hypocrites, they are worthy of infinite
pity: for thei evil may partly be not their fault, and if
they wish to escape from it, nothing can be more difficult.
The anger they arouse in men, the way they are naturally
left alone, fixes them in their moroseness and seems to
excuse it. Their sin is bound upon them; if they strive
to break through it, they are met by a disbelief only
too well earned, and they are soured the more. It is
their punishment, but it is, if we think charitably, a
very pitiful thing. Onur work on them should not be
that of abuse, but of effort to pierce through the rock
to where the springs of human kindness lic in them.
We should meet half way any effort they may make,
forgive at once and say—‘ To-day I will abide at thine
house ;” so shall we perhaps, with Christ, save a soul by
love,
Ln Robert Burns, 335

But Burns became still more wrong when he made the
evil lives of persons who seemed to be religious into a
kind of excuse for his own evil. ‘ At least he made no
boast,” we may say, and we trace the spirit of this excuse
in his poetry, ‘he did not conceal his wrong doing, nor
use religion as a garment to cover sin.” But this is the
worst of sophisms. That others are very bad, worse
than we, does not make our badness one whit the less
bad; and that we are sincere in the midst of our sin,
while others are insincere in theirs, proves, it is true,
that our character is higher, and that we have more
chance of repentance, but it does not make our sinfulness
less. ,

Nor, indeed, did Burns often make such an excuse for
himself. It was only when he was irritated and in
cpposition. He was at root true, and he never flinched
from self-blame. But he had no force to make sclf-
blame into active repentance, and he went on sinning
and being sorry, and sinning again, to the end of the
chapter—

To right or left, eternal swervin’

He zigzagged on.
Knowing the right, he could not consistently do it; and
the misery of that was deep and was one of the things
which killed him. You may remember his epistle to
Andrew Aiken, a noble piece of good advice, the last two
verses of which are worth quoting. The first shows how
well he knew his own wrong and the right he wanted,
while nothing can be more pathetic than the quiet
despair of the last two lines, “Video meliora, deteriora
sequor,”—
336 Theology in the English Poets,

When ranting round in pleasure's ring,
Religion may be blinded ;

Or if she gie a random sting,
It may be little minded ;

But when in life we’re tempest driven,
A conscience but a canker—

A correspondence fixed wi’ Heaven
Ts sure a noble anchor !

Adicu, dear, amiable youth!
Your heart can ne'er be wanting !
May prudence, fortitude, and truth
Erect your brow uudaunting !
In ploughman phrase, ‘‘God send you specd,”
Still daily to grow wiser ;
And may ye better reck the rede
Than ever did th’ Adviser,

His was not the temperament which drifts into irreligion.
His sinfulness and his consciousness of it, which never
became less bitter, kept him always from infidelity.
He was always, like the Prodigal Son, coming to him-
self and saying—‘‘I will arise and go to my Father,”
—hbut he never got more than half-way in this world.
Iiven if he had been a philosopher as well as a Poct, the
need of his nature for sympathy and for some one to lean
on, would have always prevented him from Atheism. His
fear and his love alike made him confess a God; but the
God he confessed was never brought near enough to
his heart and life to have over him the influence of a
person whom he knew loved him well enough to die
for him. I see no trace in Burns’s poetry that Christ
had any meaning to him; I see nothing but a fine
Theism. God was the unknown, Almighty Cause of all
his hope and fear, his judge, the author of his con-
science; the giver to him of passions wild and strong,
Ln Robert Burns. 337

to whom he appealed for mercy since He was all-good ;
who could not act from cruelty or wrath, on whom
with all his sins he threw himself for pity—

‘Where human weakness has come short,
Or frailty stept aside,

Do thou, All Good ! for such thou art,
In shades of darkness hide.

Where with intention I have erred,
No other plea I have,

But, thou art good, and Goodness still
Delighteth to forgive.

Tt might have given Burns strength to conquer his errors
if he could have felt for Christ the same kind of personal
love which he felt for Man and Nature. What he wanted
is what most of us who have anything of his tempera-
ment want, a higher motive of love. The sins which
arise from the weakness that passion engenders cannot be
overcome by struggling with them; they are too strong
for us. But when we have a higher love for a perfectly
good and loving person who is our divine Friend,
than we have for any one on earth, then that love
enables us to conquer. A heavenly passion only sub-
dues the evil that is in earthly passion. But Burns
could not get that. The Christ presented to him had, ac-
cording to the teaching of that time and country, nothing
in the world to do with him. He had not loved him, nor
died for him, did not care about him: the Christian
ministers of Ayrshire blotted out Christ for Burns,
and threw him back unhelped upon himself. He had no
refuge but Theism, and Theism was not enough for him,
though it may be enough for some. So he died, still

weak, still self-victimized, still longing for good, and still
z
338 Lheology in the English Poets.

unable to realize it; and the tenderest and wisest thing
we can say of his life in this world is in part of his own
epitaph :—

Is there a man whose judgment clear,

Can others teach the course to steer,

Yet runs, himself, life’s mad carcer,
Wild as the wave:

Here pause—and, through the starting tear,
Survey this grave.

The poor Inhabitant below

Was quick to learn and wise to know,

And keenly felt the friendly glow,
Aud softer flame :

But thoughtless follies laid him low,
And stained hig name,

And the noblest thing we can say of him in the future
we may say in the words of Wordsworth—words which
concentrate much of what I have said as to the good and
evil results of his life and work on mankind—words
which finally leave the shattered life and wasted soul
in the arms where Burns would, at last, gladly nestle
and be at peace,—

Enough of sorrow, wreck, and blight ;

Think rather of those moments bright

When to the consciousness of right
His course was true,

When Wisdom prospered in his sight
And virtue grew.

* * SG * *

Through busiest street and loneliest glen
Are felt the flashes of his pen ;
He rules mid winter snows, and when
Bees fill their hives ;
Decp in the general heart of men
His power survives,
In Robert Burns, 339

What need of fields in some far clime

Where Heroes, Sages, bards sublime,

And all that fetched the flowing rhyme
From genuine springs,

Shall dwell together till old Time
Folds up his wings ?

Sweet Mercy ! to the gatcs of Heaven

This Minstrel lead, his sins forgiven ;

The rueful conflict, the heart riven
With vain endeavour,

And memory of Earth’s bitter leaven,
Effaced for ever.

But why to Him confine the prayer,
When kindred thoughts and yearnings bear
On the frail heart the purest share
With all that live ?
The best of what we do and are,
Just God, forgive!

THE END.

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